Rituals in Hinduism as Related to Spirituality

Abstract

Change is taking place at an unprecedented pace on our planet. The nature of the change is historically different from anything we have previously experienced. Because of the enormous destructive power now available to so many, the world is being challenged to learn how to get along or pay the consequences, which could be extremely high. As we see it, the only way to truly promote peace is for more people to dare to transform within so that they experience greater levels of inner peace. Spiritual psychology is both a branch of psychology, like child psychology and social psychology, and a system of psychology, like psychoanalysis with a set of basic postulates that provide an overarching theoretical orientation. The basic postulate in this case is the primacy of spirit defined as the principle or center of consciousness in the embodied human condition. Spiritual psychology, acknowledging the primacy of the spirit, explores its relation to the mind and the body in the person. Spiritual psychology is then the study of the unity of the spirit, the mind and the body manifest in the human context. It serves as the bridge to connect the otherwise disparate realms of personal and transpersonal, the secular and the sacred, the normal and the paranormal. Spiritual psychology shares a great deal with religious psychology and yet is very different from it. Religious psychology, as the Cambridge psychologist Thouless (1971) defined it, seeks to understand religious behavior by applying to it the psychological principles derived from the study of non-religious behavior. Spiritual psychology goes well beyond this. It seeks to understand human nature itself from the study of the spiritual aspects in our beliefs and behavior. Postulation of the primacy of spirit is the defining characteristic of spiritual psychology. Spirit (atman) in the Indian tradition is consciousnessas-such. Consequently, the study of consciousness-as-such in its relation to the thinking-mind and the knowing-brain constitutes from the Indian perspective the subject matter of spiritual psychology (Savarkar, 1964). Spiritual Psychology is the study and practice of the art and science of human evolution in consciousness. In order to fulfill this quest, it must begin by distinguishing the essence of human evolution-what does it mean to evolve? In short, it means anything in consciousness that disturbs one's peace. It also means our illusions of separation. Essentially, this surrendering and sacrificing is work that can and has been called healing, which includes healing on the physical, mental, and emotional levels in service to the deeper revelation of who we truly are as Loving, Peaceful, Compassionate and Joyful beings.There are three major schools of thought about the ultimate nature of reality, and virtually all psychological and scientific models of mind can be classified as belonging to one of these three, which are defined as follows:* Theism: is the belief in the existence of God (a supreme being or spiritual reality), an immortal soul, or any other type of deity or deities.* Atheism: is the belief in the nonexistence of God (or any type of soul or deity), which in the modem world is often expressed as the materialist hypothesis that matter is the only reality.* Agnosticism: is the belief that the question of whether or not God (or any type of soul or deity) exists either has not been or cannot be answered (Falk, 2005).Psychology in the Indian traditionIndian tradition is very pluralistic with diverse languages, religions and schools of thought that flourished on the Indian soil for millennia. Therefore, in a significant sense, it would be wrong to speak of the Indian tradition. However, in relation to psychology in general and spiritual psychology in particular, it may not be misleading to suggest that there are shared assumptions implicit among the dominant Indian traditions that provide a foundation for a meaningful theoretical exercise and discourse on spiritual psychology. …