QUANTUM PSYCHOLOGY - THE ULTIMATE JOURNEY
Part I
When people come to psychotherapy these days, their goals are often quite different from when I started out practicing in 1970. At that time, Dr. Abraham Maslow and his self actualization ideas were catching on and, like the culture in general, many people were looking for a major change in direction and outlook. Today it seems there is more often an emphasis on fixing problems and resolving issues. Although some still seek more from therapy, often clients today are seeking to get along rather than to find deeper purpose in life. It seems that over the years, hope itself has faded.
Quantum psychology is changing that. Since quantum physics revelations have proven conclusively that consciousness, not matter is the ground of all being, it has become obvious that we must assume there is meaning in all that exists. (Dr. Amit Goswami, The Everything Book)
Meaning, though often assumed to come from the mind, is really a feeling. A satisfied customer does not ask, ‘Why am I here?’ Lack of meaning, loss of a sense of passion, enthusiasm and heartfelt purpose, is often, if not always, the underlying cause of symptoms and issues. It also puts undue pressure on relationships, where people often turn to find meaning in life, and yet wholeness is necessary for love to thrive. Our immune systems are also affected by lack of a sense of meaning. Quantum physicists are finding that health imbalances are caused exclusively by imbalances in consciousness especially when caused by heeding outside influences over one's own inner sense of balance and harmony (Dr. Bruce Lipton and Anita Moorjami at the Quantum Spirituality conference in New Mexico 2019). Thus meaning is given even to physical illness.
The search for meaning involves asking oneself questions which used to be common like 'Who am I and what am I doing here?' or 'Is the universe friendly?'. That this this has largely been replaced with short sighted goals can be interpreted as a sign of culture wide resignation.
Quantum Psychology shifts the focus from helping clients to find a workable compromise with conditioning to helping clients to seek expanded awareness and independence from conditioning. In my experience, and others may differ, this has always been the primary responsibility of psychotherapeutic intervention.
This quote from Ceanne DeRohan’s book series, The Right Use of Will, gives an apt description of the final destination of a successful inner journey on the quantum level.
“I want to introduce you now to some feelings you have not known before, no matter what your impressions are of Heaven or the Godhead. These feelings are feelings of joy that do not have to deny anything in order to be joyful, feelings of joy that have no undercurrent feelings of being only an intermission in an ongoing war and joy that need not hold back because of what tomorrow may bring.”
Societies (pretty much all of them today), impose on us a certain understanding of life, in which the potential described above is wiped from our consciousness starting in early childhood. Consider such clichés as, ‘You have to take the bad with the good’, ‘Life isn’t fair’, ‘Be realistic’, etc. Throughout the socialization process, it is impressed on us that our innate understanding about the good and magical nature of life is not real and is no more than a dangerous dream or fantasy, the belief in which marks us as naïve, childish or crazy.
These issues about the nature of reality have long been considered a philosophical debate, a matter of opinion. However, the revelations of quantum physics, which are now becoming understood by more and more people, offer a scientifically verified understanding of life far beyond the limits of our conditioned minds.
Quantum science has experimentally verified that our experiences during our waking lives are similar to dreams. No one will dispute that dreams are all about meaning. As in dreams, consciousness literally creates all of our daily experiences from perceptions and feelings we hold inside us, many of them repressed. By fully accepting those feelings, as in dreams, we get in touch with our true responses to our experiences in life. If we trust them exclusively, they will allow us to determine the best course for our lives in harmony with the natural intent of all consciousness. Our minds will eventually learn to follow our hearts instead of our conditioning (Heart/Math).
One of the biggest barriers to finding wholeness is the resignation causing us to think that the best we can hope for is to reduce or even end suffering, find a way to cope, or live from one temporal happiness to the next. The toxicity of resignation is that it ends the possibility of hope in everything it touches. Unfettered from the conditioned mind, our feelings can guide us to embrace an infinitely more hopeful big picture, reflective of our own unique longings for what it means to be alive. This may seem unrealistic in the context of compromise with conditioning, but that compromise is self imposed and can be changed. Think of society as a state of artificial stasis created by conditioning imposing severe limitation on the full acceptance of feelings, which in turn limits severely the information we need to understand life from a whole perspective.
The true nature of reality, according to quantum understanding and our own hearts, is what Plato described in his archetypes; Peace, Love, Beauty, Harmony, Justice, Truth, Self and Joy. These qualities constitute a unity, without opposites. They exist as the overall intent of Consciousness outside of space and time. (Dr. Amit Goswami) To be continued.....
Part 2
The true nature of reality, according to quantum understanding and our own hearts, is what Plato described in his archetypes; Peace, Love, Beauty, Harmony, Justice, Truth, Self and Joy. These qualities constitute a unity, without opposites. They exist as the overall intent of Consciousness outside of space and time. (Dr. Amit Goswami)
Consider the blissful smile of most any infant. What happens to that limitless bliss by the time we can talk?Through intimidation, peer pressure and a complicated system of false, self-perpetuating rationales, we are indoctrinated into giving up not only our blissful sense of well being, but our personal integrity and autonomy, our trust in our own hearts and souls, our trust and understanding of our own feelings and our self-reliance, most of it gone before we graduated from kindergarten. As Eastern religions have long proposed, we have been robbed of everything life has to offer that is truly worthwhile.
One of the most important parts of this process of deception is our own complicity in it, originally called repression, and today better known as denial. The current trend toward 'positive thinking' is also a result of our willingness to habitually deny certain of our feelings.
All of our feelings have individual purpose and sacred value. They point the way to whole consciousness. We cripple and diminish ourselves when we select only some of them to allow into our consciousness. By recognizing and fully accepting all of our feelings, they give us hope and wisdom, so that resignation cannot take hold of us.
This involves another huge misunderstanding, regarding the permanent and inevitable nature of what we have all come to know as our unconscious. While it is undeniable that we all have feelings stuck in a place where we don’t normally access them, it is not in the least true that this is our natural state nor is it true that we are powerless to retrieve these denied feelings at any time. Every day we make the choice to keep these feelings at bay. That which is ‘unconscious’ becomes conscious all the time upon being triggered by intent, spontaneous memory, events, thoughts, and feelings, even odors. They come up naturally - it is keeping them buried that takes all the work. As Carl Jung proposed, we are all perfectly capable of becoming wholly conscious (whole) if and when we are ready to.
One huge distinction between Quantum and Newtonian (classical) understanding is the place of evil in those understandings. Classical understanding has it that both good and evil are inevitable and unavoidable. There is a Hindu story about that. If you have a dark room and you want to make it light, you must bring in a source for of light, such as a light bulb or the sun. Now, if you want to make it dark again, you cannot bring in a source for darkness, because there is no such thing. To make it dark, you must remove the source for light. Darkness is nothing more than the absence of light. It is not a duality. Quantum physics teaches that consciousness, the ground of all being, when not contaminated by conditioning, knows only ever expanding pure goodness and love.
Another obstacle to becoming whole is being afraid of the unknown. In order to make the quantum leap from the 'practical' familiar illusion we have always known, to the magical world of quantum reality to which we may feel drawn, we must be free from fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is one of the darkest results of conditioning. The unknown is where everything new happens, where creativity, spontaneity, and falling in love take us. Inifinite possibility, our birth right, exists mostly in the unknown. Living in the present is of value because it gives us freedom to create something new going forward, unencumbered by memory or conditioning. Constantly comparing ourselves to a standard of normal is an example of this conditioning. Acting out of fear rather than hope and inspiration is another example. Any movement that does not move into the unknown is not really movement. Renouncing the unknown results in our future becoming nothing more than a repeat of the past, or as Jason Robards in 'A Thousand Clowns' famously called it, 'one long dental appointment'!
That having been said, the unknown quantum world is not in the least unknown to the heart. It is unknown only to the conditioned mind, where we have learned to put all our trust. To choose the unknown, we must return to the heart. We must also rethink our doubts. One destructive doubt we may find within ourselves is that it is unlikely that we will ever have the kind of existence we truly desire. Other doubts tell us to avoid even worthwhile risk, to fear and avoid hope, to hold on to non-productive attachments, and to limit our awareness of the full range of our emotions.
When the conditioned mind is calmed down through quantum understanding and such practices as meditation and yoga, it starts to naturally follow the heart instead of its unnatural conditioning. Society is designed so that you must relate to conditioning to get along, but that doesn’t mean you have to be obsessed with it to the point of being programmed. You can learn to use it only when necessary, while letting the heart lead the way all the rest of the time.
Once you can declare to yourself that you must be fulfilled, that even if you have no idea how it can happen, it must happen, you are on your way. In quantum understanding, your desires at the deepest level only need your conscious attention to start moving toward manifesting. This is not, as in The Secret, a mandate to make affirmations with your mind, but rather to get in touch with your quantum (real) self through opening to your feelings and the most profound desires of your heart. In this manner, society will find its proper place within the infinitely bigger picture of life itself and the question will be answered once and for all, "What am I doing here?"
For more understanding and inspiration on this topic, I recommend Amit Goswami's books, Creativity and The Visionary Window, a Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment and Anita Moorjami, Dying to Be Me.
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Ronnie Diener, LMFT, LPCC is a quantum psychotherapist in private practice in Silver City, NM. with over 40 years experience. She also does teleconference therapy for people anywhere in New Mexico and California. She is currently pursuing advanced studies in quantum psycho spiritual understanding through the University of Technology in Jaipur, India.