The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality

Abstract

Abstract A Spiritual Renaissance of Psychological Science has arrived: an explosion of rigorously derived, foundationally new models of human experience. The collective vision of psychological science in the second edition of the OUP Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality advances psychological research beyond 20th-century radical materialism and mechanism, to inform the rapidly evolving spiritually oriented global Zeitgeist that surrounds academia. In the first edition of the OUP Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, leading researchers asserted a foundational new paradigm of spirituality and psychology, based upon an ontology that holds consciousness as primary, termed postmaterialism. The most recent decade has spawned scholarly societies such as Academy for the Advancement of Post-Material Science and Open Sciences catalyzing energetic collaboration, inquiry, and discovery, engaging scientists to expand our understanding of the inherent spiritual nature of humanity and revolutionize our understanding of the human psyche. Studies reported in this volume, in design, data analysis, and interpretation, reveal a scientific migration from the conceiving of the “hermetic human,” quite reflective of anthropocentric solipsism (as in 20th-century psychology) to a view of the “open-system human,” ontologically existing as part of a surrounding field of consciousness, information, love and intention. Reported MRI studies in this volume explore consciousness not as resolutely epiphenomenal of the brain nor as secondary to the foundational material brain, but as existing both independently and broadly in and through mind, brain, human biology, and all life. Some of the scholars in this volume show a radical shift for science in acknowledging a central “Source of consciousness,” understood as a Higher Power, G-d, a generative intelligence in the universe. Known by many names to the world religious, wisdom, and cultural traditions, here scientists observe a site line once found exclusively through religion through the lens of science. Postmaterialism now reorients clinical conceptualization, the goals and method of psychotherapy. In the second edition, several clinical scientists take spiritual awareness as core to mental health, whole person development, and human biology. Psychological healing is part and parcel of spiritual growth and expanding human awareness. Absent in this volume is the vestige of monolithic pathologizing of transcendent perception and of suffering per se. Through this new lens, humans suffer when we limit our awareness and shut down perception of our connection with the fullness of existence. Naturally, then, we feel isolated, disempowered, and the existential emptiness of being narrowly self-focused and generally self-serving. Depression and narcissism perhaps even derive from our inherent telos to become more than a closed system, hermetic humans, from our starving to join the broader family of life. An inner struggle, often seen as a sub-type or form of depression called developmental depression, ignites and invites expansion of awareness. Treatment then moves from the narrow directive of mitigating symptoms and regaining functionality, to an opportunity for profound awakening into an alignment with the field of life. In a quest for augmenting spiritual awareness, clinical psychology moves from the postindustrial aim of “fix-it back to baseline,” forward to a spiritual response to suffering, as foundation in renewal and growth. Our contemporary university students (who came of age while pulling information out of the air by cell phone) are eager to discover “open system” models of consciousness, as much to hold personal experience as to gain insight into academic direction. Now more than two decades into the 21st century, human psyche is seen as continuous with broader conscious field in and through nature, such that scientists meet here across so-called subdisciplines of physics, biology, medicine, and history. Science holds a mirror to long-standing spiritual truths held in religion and wisdom traditions. Now is a global inflection point in our historical understanding of human nature within a greater universe. Here society evolves from a scientific new vision.