Altered States

Psychological Spirituality
 
Those who are presently promoting altered states of consciousness within the church are not theologians reviving medieval mysticism, but rather psychologists or those influenced by psychology.
 
Some psychologists have discovered a wide range of uses for this altered state of consciousness. "Inner healing" counselors encourage entranced patients to relive past traumatic experiences. Recovered memory therapists employ the altered state to recover memories of alleged sexual abuse, past lives, and UFO abductions.
 
Based upon the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these "trained professionals" claim that the altered state of consciousness taps into the content of the unconscious mind where repressed memories of past trauma reside.
 
But what does this have to do with visualizing Jesus and spiritual experience?
 
Freud and Jung had a disagreement over the content of the unconscious mind. This led to their traumatic break-up. While Freud believed that repressed sexual content resided within the unconscious, Jung, based on his own experience, contended that the unconscious was also a receptacle for spiritual, religious, and mythological content. Freud admonished his young cohort and encouraged him to dogmatize his sexual theory and raise it up as a bulwark against the "black mud of occultism." (4) Jung pursued his "spiritual" theories, proving Freud to be prophetic! We are encountering the "black mud of occultism."
 
The gurus of the new holistic transpersonal psychology, using Jung's notion of unconscious spirituality, see the altered state of consciousness as the touch-point between psychology and religion.
 
http://www.issuesetc.org/resource/journals/centerng.htm
 
[TBC: The melding of religion into "science falsely so called" continues.]