THERAPY IS FUNDAMENTALLY ANTI-SPIRITUAL!

I am not sorry for using a yet another provocative title which might trigger my liberal elite friends or rather my liberal elite acquaintances. But I am following the ways of my Favorite philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I stand by my title. Here's how. 

People, who today talk about mental health, try to club therapy and spirituality under the same box. They try to sell a sort of cocktail of meditation, positive affirmations, law of attraction and therapy under the same tagline, "Good for mental health". But This is the same as when one says, boiled chicken, Chicken curry, Chicken Mughlai and other chicken dishes are healthy for you. The thing to note here is that they are different things and on different levels affect our mental health. On one hand, these stupidities like law of attraction and positive affirmations are bull crap pseudoscience, On the other hand, Adhyatm, or the science of self-knowledge is like salad for your mental health. Let us expand. 

Psychology, till now, especially western, is non-creative management of mind. Whenever you visit a therapist and talk about your problem, the pattern in most of times, where a non-pathological issue is addressed, remains to somehow let you express your frustration and wait till the last and then somehow to convince you that you should console yourself because the terrible thing that happened to you, happens to most of us and hence it is a problem beyond repair in some sense and hence just bear with it and it will go. But wait a minute! Isn't this attitude a particular pathos which might lead to further repression of emotions? Temporarily you might think that you are relaxed because you accepted your pain and now you are ok, but wait, if the pain is not diminishing but is continuous, like sometimes, when you are in a toxic relation, or you are oppressed as a group in a system, do you really think a continuous acceptance will help? Won't standing up and fighting and may be showing a little bit "ruthlessness" help? Now, Cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT seems to be an attempt to normalize your pain or your problem. I am saying, if the lunacy is normalized as a mass hysteria someday, will normal sane people need therapy then? Hence, A need to critique therapy as anti-spiritual seemed necessary. 

Let us talk about Adhyatm now. Adhyatm sets a meta narrative when you are told, you are on your own. You are alone. Now what will you do? Why do you presume that life must bring happiness to you? Why life should be under obligation to make you happy? Isn't this your responsibility? Why do you think pain should make you sad only? Why do you associate with these dichotomies of good and bad in ethics, happy and sad in psychology and existent and non-existent in philosophy? And tells you the permanent human ambiguity of human conformity and human illness. Adhyatm, in this sense, is meta-psychological or creative psychology. It does not teach you to normalize your pain because it is happening to everyone. Neither does it tell to manipulate yourself to a compromised truth like, its ok if it happens to everyone. It gives you paradigm, a kind of philosophical space where you can question, "Is this ok even if it happens to most of us?", "Is my problem be solved permanently?" 

I will mention here of Maharshi Raman, a great saint of this country pre-independence. he gave the concept of psychosynthesis or effectively synthesizing or transforming the self which is previously was under the effect of meta-diseases called, Mind, Intelligence and Ego. 

In western psychology, Mind is said to be the thinking space, Intelligence the accumulated knowledge, and Ego as the self. Raman, in his teachings, somewhat reversed it. He echoed the traditional knowledge of Upanishads, where one considers these as animalistic diseases which human needs to come out in order to realize her humanness. Ego is different from the self. Ego is a disease. Mind is not the thinking space. It is the thinker self. It is and aid, a sort of house help, which aids thinking. Intelligence is precisely ignorance since it is based on non-experience but just read somewhere or logically articulated in language. The human counterpart is intellect, which is realized and actualized knowledge which is based on experience. Deductive and inductive reasoning is critiqued heavily in Eastern Philosophical reasoning. 

Therapy should be encouraged as a temporary medicine, but it is not replacement of a yet permanent solution, which is a healthy transformation of self through Adhyatm. A positivist way of life, Jeevan jeene ka Vidhai Tareeqa".