A Pathway to Spirituality
Psychiatry December 1, 2005 Jon A. Shaw 13 citations
Mystical experiences appear across all eras and religions, with traditions sharing a sense of union with the absolute as the ultimate spiritual goal. The pathway to both theistic and secular spirituality evolves from human attempts to cope with life's limitations: separation, loss, biological fragility, transience, and non-existence. Spirituality can serve as the affective component of a belief system or myth, lived as true despite lacking scientific evidence. It may act as a reparative process, creating in the external world a symbolic facet of an internalized mental representation that has become lost, or it may represent continuity of the self-representation after death through self-object merger.