Abstract and Conclusions for Article, “The Way of Trans-personal Being:

The True Resolution of the Blues”   Primary Author: Dr. Max Hammer (with editing by Dr. Barry Hammer)   True psychotherapy does not involve helping clients “feel better” in a false way by providing any kind of consoling distracting escape from the actual experiential truth of themselves. Instead, the basic goal of genuine psychotherapy is to truly resolve or heal psychological pain by making it fully consciously experienced, rather than disguising or evading it in any way.  

Genuine psychological and spiritual growth (or Trans-personal/Divine Self-Realization) can be achieved only if psychotherapists urge their clients to clearly acknowledge and fully consciously experience their painful or uncomfortable emotional feelings (the “blues”), rather than encouraging clients to escape from actual unpleasant experiential truths or uncomfortable emotional feelings by superimposing falsely comforting positive thoughts, desired affirmations, or pleasurable sensations, which could be described as covering over the blues by superimposing the “pinks” or false consoling distractions. However, superimposing more pleasant thoughts, interpretations, affirmations, and sensations only superficially covers over deeper troubled emotional feelings and unpleasant experiential states, but does not truly resolve, heal, or transcend them.

The only effective way to truly resolve, heal, or transcend unpleasant emotional feelings and experiential states is by letting them arise to our full conscious awareness, without any kind of control, censorship, selective filtering, interference, distracting escapes, or distancing speculative interpretations of the unpleasant feelings. This genuine psycho therapeutic process of intimate experiential contact with troubled emotional feelings is in contrast to predetermined, controlled, biased, distorted interpretation of the client’s feelings and experiential states, which involves speaking for the feelings from a distancing stance dualistically outside of the feelings, instead of letting the feelings speak for themselves from a perspective of the client engaging in non-selective conscious unification with his/her actual uncomfortable feelings or experiential states.  

There are only two basic ways to deal with the blues (i.e., any painful psychological state or uncomfortable emotional feeling). One is for our conscious awareness to penetrate beyond distancing, presumptive, speculative, conceptual interpretations into direct, deeper, experiential contact with the emotional feelings that are actually arising within our self, from moment to moment. That approach is termed, the way of Being; whereas the other approach is termed, the way of becoming. The way of becoming basically involves the attempt to escape from direct/unmediated experiential contact with or full conscious awareness of the blues by superimposing some more positively valued, desired, idealized, comforting/self-consoling, distracting, interpretation, self-definition, self-conceptualization, or pleasurable compensatory feeling or sensation upon it. Those kinds of distractions may be referred to as the pinks, for purposes of clarifying this discussion.

The pinks represent a kind of “rose-colored,” proficient, or positively value judged (selectively approved), view of your own individual being and emotional feelings, or experiential life; whereas the blues represent a deficient, negatively value judged (selectively disapproved), emotionally troubled, view of your individual being, feelings, and experiential states. Both the blues and the pinks involve distorted  interpretations of your emotional feelings or experiential states, as if viewing them “through a glass darkly,” or “a poor reflection” (I Corinthians 13:12), distanced from direct contact with your actual emotional feelings and related experiential states.  

Genuinely effective psychotherapy cannot be the result of any predetermined method or technique, because those all involve controlled, selective, biased, partisan, commitments by conscious awareness, which obstructs and distorts direct experiential observation of what is actually, spontaneously, arising within the client’s psyche, in a given moment. On the contrary, effective psycho therapeutic treatment necessarily involves encouraging clients to be open to the actual experiential truth of themselves, from moment to moment, and letting that intimate contact with their actual emotional feelings produce a more conscious experience of discomfort, which may temporarily intensify the discomfort, but ultimately leads to greater healing rather than greater misery.

When the client’s consciousness is not defensive, not controlled, but fully unguarded, then it is free to flow intimately with the spontaneously arising actual experiential truth of him/herself, from moment to moment, without any kind of evasion, distancing, selective bias, resistance, or distortion. That absence of predetermined goals enables clients to gain insights into their psyche that are very creative and psychologically growth-oriented, i.e., highly flexible and unrestricted, as a basis of developing effective psycho therapeutic healing, deeper levels of genuine experiential self-understanding, and greater access to the creative core of their being, involving the ability to discover limitless new productive possibilities that are consistent with the clients’ being and the reality of life as a whole.

Dealing with what is, requires no prescribed technique, whereas dealing with what ideally, presumptively “should be” requires a method of some kind as a means of trying to fulfill some kind of predetermined goal.