TOPAZ Magazine | Psychology - From a Template perspective

Psychology can be described as the understanding of the way the human thinks and behaves and the reasons why they do what they do.

But a Template view reveals it to be much more - it is more importantly the way a human perceives the world, the media by which a human connects to the world, both seen and unseen, and establishes his or her life and way of living within a system of rationality and values, which then governs the way the human thinks and acts thereafter.

Psychology could be described as a personal filter through which the human views the world, which can range from transparent to opaque in its limitation or openness to the fundamental realities that are common to all humans who have ever lived.

"All that I experience is psychological. In the end we are so much wrapped in psychological pictures that we cannot get through to the essence of things except through ourselves. All that we ever can know consists of psychological matter. Psyche is the most real being, because it is the only immediate thing. This is the reality the psychologist can refer to, the reality of the psychological."
C.G. Jung

Charles Dickens once wrote a newspaper article railing in his day at the deliberate blindness of his world to injustice and inhumanity under the headline 'It will last my time'. In other words, 'I will live for my today and my lifetime and the rest of the lives yet to come can take care of themselves'. The word for this is 'solipsism' - a philosophy based entirely in self.

This is the root of most modern psychology, which, as an academic discipline, has developed from the work of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic movement of the early twentieth century. Although there were influential offshoot developments though the work of others such as C. G. Jung (see boxed sections), who attempted to incorporate a more broad based and spiritual dimension, it was all based in the experience of life over 100 years ago in an age very different to our own. The changes that have taken place in the last 100 years are totally awesome in comparison to any other period of human history. The industrial revolution has been enhanced by advances in human knowledge on all fronts and accelerated by the technological revolution with, for example, the motorcar, television and the Internet... It is not an unreasonable proposition that a fundamental new approach to psychology is needed for these very different times.

Unfortunately the legacy of Freudian psychology with its emphasis on control of subconscious desires has led to a collective conformity in the modern, consumer-orientated world, which suppresses individual self-determination and freedom. This can all too often constitute an opaque filter of prejudice and isolation, serving to protect the individual and their society from the consciousness of a world rapidly becoming obsessively materialistic and irrational, in which external solutions are increasingly impossible to find and believe in. It is now a case of 'nurture divorced from nature' and dislocation of the human from the natural order of Creation, with consequent dire prognosis for the future of our planet and ourselves.
So is there another way, another starting point?

In very preliminary outline, this article offers an introduction from a human Template standpoint to this subject, which is one of the most challenging and important issues facing human life in the twenty first century. Indeed it could be argued that the root of the problems of the human situation lies in the understandings (and misunderstandings) of modern psychology and that answers, if they exist, thereby lie in a new approach to the subject of human psychology.

As laid out in the Template article (Topaz 3), fundamental to the Template view is that the human is endowed with a Spirit and Soul and the starting focus of an understanding of psychology begins with the latter - the Soul.

"The modern persuasion of the primat of the physical leads finally to a psychology without soul, in which the psychological can be nothing else than a biochemical effect."
C.G. Jung

In making all this possible there are certain preconditions that had to be accommodated in the design of the human. The human situation could not be fixed and definitive and the human system had to be made with infinite flexibility to cope with and be able to respond to a huge variety of different and unpredictable conditions - imagine the difference between living as a Roman soldier or a peasant farmer in the Dark Ages, and our own situation in the twenty first century.
Thus the system had to be made with an orchestrating principle able to deal with this degree of flexibility. This is the Soul. By analogy, imagine an orchestra without a conductor to control and integrate its various component instruments into the requirements of the symphony. It would be useless to create such a flexible and versatile instrument as the human complex without such a sophisticated conductor.
The human has the facility of the Soul as the orchestration media of life. The human also faces the opportunity and challenge of self-determination of optimum performance within the design of the complex and its evolution. However, all parts of the systems within the human model have the potential for fixing themselves in abdication from the responsibility of choice.

The human is not designed to be fixed; freedom is provided for and indeed anticipated in the system but cannot by definition be made mandatory. It is up to each human to choose and seize the opportunity of freedom or reduce themselves to the level of lesser life in the overall hierarchy of life on this planet (for example, mineral, flora, fauna, human, natural unseen forces and powers...). Freedom is a matter of progression, development and connection within and then outside the planet's hierarchy to other more sublime and more rarefied levels.
Where psychology, or more accurately Soul Psychology, enters into all this is in terms of the reaction of the human to the unfolding situation of its life as it becomes acquainted with new circumstances and challenges - ever needful of fresh and unique response. The human is designed for it but, as explained, it cannot be legislated for or guaranteed.

All humans who have ever lived add to the unconscious psychological stock and legacy within the unseen worlds of the planet's aura whilst they use this stock as they live by sharing and exchange. The level and quality of the stock which is accessible to each life for the benefit of its own journey and eventual destination, is determined by frequency (like a radio set) and this in turn is determined by sentiment, standards and behaviour - in which the ever-present danger is the fixing of themselves and their systems in lesser circumstance, lesser challenge and eventually in a situation of 'lock out' from these realms of natural enhancement and connection.

"The esteem of the unconscious psyche as a source of cognition is not at all as illusionary, as western rationalism wants it to be. Our inclination is that all cognition stems from the outside in the end. We nowadays know for certain that the unconscious offers contents which, if made conscious, would mean an immeasurable increase of cognition."
C.G. Jung

The purpose of the individual human in this journey from birth to death and rebirth (reincarnation) is to build the higher systems that contribute to the enhancement of their own future lives and service in Creation and of the place of their current domicile, the planet, for the benefit of those spirits constantly being born and reborn in this extraordinary and unique ecology.

By majority, modern psychology is not only based in a narrow interpretation of human life in material terms, but it also denies or avoids the fundamental issue of the proposition of life after death. A Template approach to psychology sees human life as a series of episodes of appearance in different forms and different circumstances for the purpose of individual self-establishment and service to Creation and Creation's human purposes.