Psych. PPP. 1. 2 – 5. Jesus: “What better purpose could any relationship have than to invite the Holy Spirit to enter into it and give it His Own great gift of rejoicing?
What higher goal could there be for anyone than to learn to call upon God and hear His Answer? And what more transcendent aim can there be than to recall ‘the way, the truth and the life,’ and to remember God? To help in this healing process should now be seen as the proper purpose of psychotherapy.
Could anything be holier? For psychotherapy, now properly understood, teaches true forgiveness and helps the ‘patient’ (partner, co-worker, client or friend) to recognize and accept it. And in his healing, is the ‘therapist’ (you or me) forgiven and healed in our joining with him!
Everyone who needs help, regardless of the form of his distress, is attacking himself, and his peace of mind is suffering in consequence!
These tendencies are widely recognized as being ‘self-destructive,’ and even the patient himself often regards them that way. What the patient does not realize and needs to learn is that ‘this self,’ which can attack and be attacked as well, is but a ‘concept of himself’ he has made up! Further, he has come to cherish this self-concept and defend it, sometimes ‘willing to sacrifice his very life’ on its behalf! For he regards the self-concept as himself! He sees this self as being ‘acted upon,’ and merely reacting to external forces as they seem to demand of him, appearing helpless midst the ‘overwhelming power’ of the world.
Psychotherapy must restore to his awareness his inherent ability to make his own decisions, so that he really can ‘choose once again.’ The patient, then, must become willing to reverse his own thinking, and to understand that all the worldly effects perceived as ‘imposed on him’ were made instead by his projections onto the world. And therefore, the world he sees attacking him does not exist but in his own mind! Until this is at least in part understood and accepted, the patient cannot see himself as capable of making decisions that will lead to his freedom. And in his ‘upside-down’ thinking he will even fight against his freedom, if but because he thinks that it is somehow ‘slavery.’
The patient need not equate truth with God in order to make progress in salvation. But he must begin to separate truth from illusion, recognizing that they are not the same, and become increasingly willing to see illusions as false and accept the truth as true, thus letting the illusions go. His inner Teacher will take him on from there, as far as he is ready to go. Psychotherapy can only save him time!
The Holy Spirit uses time as He thinks best, and He is never wrong. Psychotherapy under His direction is one of the means He uses to save time, and to prepare additional teachers for His work. There is no end to the help that He begins and He directs.
By whatever routes the Holy Spirit chooses for each person, all psychotherapy leads to God in the end. But that is up to Him. We are all His psychotherapists, for He would have us all be healed in Him.”