Spirituality, and psychological self- and other-scrutiny

[Asolsutsesvyl]

I would view it from a different angle:

You are equalizing psychology = psychology
and
spirituality = spirituality

I'll try to change angle to something that seems closer to your thinking, then perhaps it'll be clearer what differences are more about language and what differences are not mainly about language.

Neither spirituality nor psychology happens outside of people, but always within people.
So it's never about spirituality but about the very person's spirituality. The same goes for psychology.

Spirituality and psychology ultimate are about "Self".
And both try to describe "Self".

[...]

Regarding psychology, in our academic system people are taught in university about Self and how it all works, they learn from books.
It is all just an intellectual understanding.
Then many stay on that level and research or maybe offer therapy.

I would say both happen between people, too, and not only inside them. Thus, there's both personal and impersonal psychology and spirituality.

If you go all the way to a transcendent view of "Self", where all is one, then sure, it's all about "Self". Such a "Self" transcends the personal. But whenever dealing with something more concrete, it turns into dealing with the many selves in the world -- including one's own -- and how they interact, and how that works. Unless you deal with it like a mystic without bothering with language, which in part you can, but that part alone cannot be communicated on this level.

But I do tend to associate psychology with something more materialistic, or alternatively, something which reduces spirituality to a more flat symbolic world. There's many things which are called psychology, some junk, some profound, and some useful but only about how physical brain tissue performs, etc. I know academic psychology is a mess.

We live in a very intellect based and academic society.
In our society it's absolutely normal people talk about, teach and publish books about things they don't even know. As long as it sounds academic, it's cool

If you look at from which aspect of Self people describe "Self" it gets clearer what I mean.

I'm familiar with the basic perspective. Gurdjieff observed a century ago that people in our kind of civilization value knowledge, but generally don't value how the being of a person is and develops. How people develop, through experience and more, in their being determines what quality of understanding they can have. Without that, all that people can do is to increase the quantity of information in their minds. Understanding requires both being and knowledge, but only in areas like craftsmanship, etc., do people generally care about real understanding (because then it determines the results in a very visible way).

I agree with that. I know that some that I know is far more "flat" and limited in how well I understand it than other things. But it's of course impossible to know accurately your own gaps in understanding except by advancing your own understanding past them.

Since "Self" is not "Intellect", so,ebody describing Self from the intellect can neither grasp nor the mechanism of it. It remains very superficial and shallow, and in most cases farfrom the truth.

The same can be said about spirituality.
You cannot explore Self intellect tually, since the intellect is a part of the illusory self.
You might believe you explore Self, but you just describe that which it is not.

So if either spirituality or psychology stays on that level, there many contradictions.

How transcendental a meaning do you give to "Self" here? If very, then yeah. If not very, then I have to draw a line around the illusory world we experience together for a reason, and say that for practical purposes -- it helps self and others in this illusory world (in many ways, materially or otherwise) -- there's plenty of usefulness to the intellect and what it can produce. And like a tool, it can be used more or less well, for more or less shallow results, in connection with different things (aspects of self).

(That kind of thing -- "How transcendental" -- may be totally clear to you, but it's the kind of thing often left dangling, and I've seen many silly talking-past-each-other arguments between others due to such things simply being kept too vague in language.)

If you look at the work of the great Yogis of old, or great psychologists, great therapists, if you look at people like Aurobindo, the amazonian Shamans, just to name a few, you will see, that if you really go deep, there is no contradiction or difference for that matter between religion, spirituality, psychology, therapy and science.

When reaching real depths, you see that it's all the same. But you have to go deep.

On the surface, it's all contradicting.

Kind of, sort of. I get the "when it works, then it reaches the same essense" kind of gist.

I disagree with the binary way in which you categorize when the intellect can't be used at all, vs. when it can. I think there's a continuum where what the intellect can do becomes lesser and lesser, until it no longer has any reach. Planes, polarities, densities, etc. -- this is part of the rough means by which the intellect can join in, when one is dealing with stuff in that fuzzy continuum where the intellect is mainly a rough chronicler while the acting part of the self is centered elsewhere and less tangibly.

Roughly, I think there's several currents active in the stuff you mentioned. There's stuff that converges and stuff that diverges. Some involved in genuinely transcendental spirituality are pulled in different directions, to different destinations, than others -- there's no doubt about that from what's known about practitioners and how greatly they differ. And it's the same whether it's religion or psychology or science as the outer shell of it.

Maybe distinctions in what you claim to all be the same can be known at this level analogously to how animals can know that some landscapes are better to live in than others. Heaven and hell are both largely unfathomable, but not the same thing, and some genuine spiritual currents pull strongly towards one or the other. (You don't need the intellect to tell that there's a difference of some kind, when some personal experience of such a difference is had. And after you're convinced, then you can't be satisfied with thinking that there's only one illusory world and one real thing -- there's clearly more in-between this and "The All".)