While psychology and esoteric systems can sometimes diverge depending on your perspective, there are two areas in which both sides often seem to encounter similar developmental territory: descent and ascension.
Many older traditions, particularly those concerned with depth, shadow, initiation, and transformation, contain journeys into darkness, underworlds, death and rebirth, ordeals, confrontations with monsters, periods of isolation, and symbolic dismemberment followed by reconstruction.
Psychology has its own languages for confronting painful, avoided, unconscious, contradictory, or previously unintegrated material. We descend. Into history. Into emotion. Into patterns. Into fear. Into the unconscious. Into whatever darkness lies beneath the person we presently experience ourselves to be.
The explanations aren’t identical. But the developmental principle is recognizable: Sometimes you cannot understand what is happening on the surface without exploring what lies underneath it.
A reaction may have a history. A belief may have been formed under circumstances you’ve forgotten. A strength may have grown from something painful. A behavior that causes problems today may once have solved a problem extremely well. So, we descend.
This is not necessarily movement backward in the developmental sense. It is movement toward depth. You follow the present downward into what helped create it. And there are things worth finding there. But finding them isn’t enough. You must carry them back.
The objective isn’t to construct a permanent home at the bottom of the spiral. The objective is to return to where you began with something you didn’t possess when you left. Understanding. Awareness. Acceptance. A different interpretation. A lesson. A choice. A recovered part of yourself. Whatever was found at depth must encounter the present person before it can become part of present life.
The Other Side of Experience
A great deal of spiritual language also points upward. Higher consciousness. Higher Self. Ascension. Transcendence. Enlightenment. Liberation.
The imagery is understandable. Height gives us perspective. Rising above something allows us to see relationships that may be invisible while standing inside them. Many spiritual traditions therefore associate development with ascent—with reaching beyond the limitations of our ordinary perspective toward something greater.
As we move upward conceptually, perspective expands. From close enough, an event can occupy your entire field of vision. Move farther away and it becomes one event among many. Move farther still and relationships between events become visible. Patterns appear. What seemed random may acquire context. What seemed overwhelmingly important may become smaller. What seemed insignificant may reveal itself as part of something much larger. This is one reason spiritual and contemplative traditions have always been attracted to the symbolism of ascent. Higher perspective can change understanding.
But there is a danger here too. Perspective can become distance.
If the objective becomes permanently escaping the ordinary human condition—escaping the body, emotion, difficulty, responsibility, relationship, limitation, or material life—then the very perspective that was supposed to expand life can become a means of withdrawing from it. I don’t regard transcendence as useless. I question transcendence that never returns. If you climb high enough to see something that couldn’t be seen from the ground, then bring what you saw back to the ground. That is where it becomes practical.
A spiritual realization should eventually encounter behavior. A philosophical understanding should eventually encounter decisions. Greater consciousness should eventually encounter ordinary relationships. Expanded perspective should eventually encounter responsibility. Whatever happens in meditation eventually encounters the person who gets up from meditation. Whatever happens during ritual eventually encounters the person who leaves the ritual space. Whatever is learned in solitude eventually encounters another human being. Whatever is discovered beyond the ordinary perspective eventually has to be expressed through an ordinary life if it is going to become part of that life.
The Present Is the Point of Contact
It could be easy to misunderstand this and think the present is simply a neutral midpoint between darkness below and light above. For me, this is where spirituality and personal development become inseparable. Below you is depth. Above you is perspective. You can travel downward to understand what lies beneath your present condition. You can travel upward to see your present condition from increasingly larger perspectives.
But the life you are actually living is occurring here. In the present.
That makes the present something more than the starting point of the journey. It is the place where what you discover elsewhere becomes capable of affecting your life. You can descend into the past and discover why a particular pattern exists. Useful. But eventually you must return to the present and ask:
What am I going to do differently now that I understand it?
You can ascend into an extraordinary spiritual perspective and experience yourself, humanity, consciousness, or existence in a completely different way. Useful. But eventually you must return and ask:
How does someone who has seen that live differently tomorrow morning?
Without that return, insight can remain insight. Integration requires embodiment. That makes the present the grounds of integration.
It is where the different directions meet. It is where information becomes choice. It is where perspective becomes action. It is where understanding becomes behavior. It is where the past encounters the possibility of a different future. It is where the spiritual encounters the physical. It is where whatever you believe about consciousness, soul, meaning, or existence must encounter the fact that right now you are also a human being living a human life.
You descend. You return. You ascend. You return. And each return potentially changes the person standing there. You can encounter similar territory repeatedly while experiencing it from a different depth or height. You may return to an old question years later and discover that it is no longer asking quite the same thing, because you are no longer the same person asking the question. Extraordinary experiences can be valuable. So can profound psychological insights. So can symbolic experiences, difficult confrontations with yourself, periods of contemplation, and moments when your perspective seems to expand beyond anything you previously understood. Because I believe greater depth and greater perspective can help us become increasingly capable of engaging with life and being human deliberately.
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