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The HEP Method of Spiritual Counselling

List of Contents

1 A Complex Overview of the HEP Method 2

2 The HEP Model 6
3 HEP Process, Aims and Goals 8
4 Romantic Mysticism in the HEP Method 15
5 Spiritual Counselling and Psychotherapy 37
6 HEP Aphorisms 42
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The HEP Method of Spiritual Counselling

A Complex Overview of the HEP Method

HEP Spiritual Counselling is a form of existential mysticism where the focus of
concern is the individual’s immediate experience of being an embodied subject in the
here and now. This attunement to immediate, local reality evokes a sense of identity
and place in time. It is emergent and phenomenological. It also initiates a dawning
awareness of evolutionary movement that is an unfolding of human potential for the
individual, a kind of path experience (“I am on a journey”). This involves a sense of
deepening awareness of self (“I am a multilayered being”). This deepening journey
evokes an increasing sense of multivalent complexity that has a circular, spiral quality of
moving into the centre of the self by circling through a set of experiences that are
multifaceted, like a diamond. This is a set of contradictions that are typically
experienced as dualistic – either, or – with an attendant sense of conflict that can only
be resolved through one polarity presiding over the other. The HEP Method calls for
engaging these dualistic polarities in such a way that the complementary nature of the
contradiction is discovered and enacted, giving rise to an integrative dialectic third, a
synthesis, without eliminating the tension of opposites. In the HEP Method this is how
the ‘one’ is manifest. ‘It is just the opposite tension of the opposites that constitutes the
unity of the one’. (Heraclitus)
The integrative, chaotic complexity of this unfolding path involves not just an
evolving sense of identity, but also an evolving sense of reality. The Valentinian Gnostic
questions ‘who am I, where am I, where do I come from, where am I going’ are enacted
such that the individual moves beyond everyday personal concerns, through engaging
the difficulties of everyday personal concerns, into a transpersonal, archetypal sense of
identity and reality. Spiritual experiences are facilitated and the imaginal reality of the
dream like nature of existence comes into focus, becoming part of day to day reality.
Through this very challenging, characterological, evolutionary journey there is a
discovery of the authorial level of being and living. This includes what various spiritual
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and mystical traditions have identified as a divine-human union experience – the

awareness of the presence of a divine origin of existence as being not only outside as
an ‘Other’, but also inside as an ‘other’. This whole set of experiences has the qualities
of what Stan and Christina Grof, David Lukoff and Frances Lu have called ‘spiritual
emergence’. This is a difficult, challenging process of awakening to the spiritual
dimension of existence in a way that has not previously been present for that individual.
It can involve direct experience of the archetypal world (as a felt sense, as an energetic
phenomenon, as a being), psychic experiences, a sense of the presence of the spirits of
the dead, angelic encounters, cosmological awareness, what seems like knowledge of
the true nature of life and death, and of the purpose and meaning of one’s individual life,
as well as life itself. A person’s sense of identity and reality transcends that given by the
rational, empirical scientific tradition of the Enlightenment model of identity and reality
and begins to align more with the Romantic sense of identity and reality. Thus the HEP
Method may be ultimately understood as a form of Romantic Mysticism.
HEP is a transpersonal tradition that is a “psychologically-informed spirituality
and a spiritually-based psychology” (D.Lukoff, F. Lu, “History of Transpersonal
Psychotherapy”, p1, ATP website). HEP sees the spiritual not as an abstract, idealistic
regulatory function, but as a vital part of daily life that expresses a deep part of what it is
to be human, including qualities of mind such as compassion and caring, the capacity to
bring meaning and purpose into focus, and an awareness of the transcendent function.
In this, HEP values the conscious capacity to develop through choice and intentionality
by responsibly taking up the circumstances of our life and history. This calls for courage,
insight, creativity, wonder, skill, wisdom and the willingness to surrender into the
complex connectivity of our individual human subjectivity.
HEP draws on the symbolic and metaphoric powers of the human imagination in
addressing individual, cultural and planetary evolutionary challenges. HEP recognizes
the co-creative evolutionary relationship of nature and psyche, locating the
psychological within the natural as an expression of the differentiating tendency of the
living cosmos, where creativity and interdependence are the foundation, the process
and the goal. In this, individual human nature is seen to be also in a co-creative
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relationship with the existential divine as manifest in the natural world and in the
community of subjects that is human relationships.
The HEP Method draws on humanistic, existential, transpersonal,
psychodynamic, archetypal and somatic depth psychologies, as well as the new
sciences of holism, chaos theory and self-organizing systems theory. The HEP tradition
is also participating in the current re-emergence of spiritual models that draw on ancient
cosmologies, from both eastern and western mystical traditions, where nature is seen to
embody patterns of integration that link the part with the whole so that everything is
understood to be interconnected. In this view, we can see that the world is not a
collection of separate ‘things’, but a pattern of dynamic relationships, as life unfolds in
the individual, the culture and the world. This includes a complex understanding of the
‘norm of nature’ and ‘healing power of nature’ as expressed in Naturphilosophie,
homeopathy and naturopathy. It also includes a focus on Thomas Berry’s geocentric
theology with its implicit ecopsychological and ecospiritual approach to the study of
earth stewardship. HEP also draws on the Romantic and postmodern traditions in
philosophy and culture, modernist art and literature, and Continental Philosophy as a
way of understanding human relationship and the place of individuality in culture and
cosmos.
The underlying existential and archetypal theme in HEP is the unfolding of
individual human nature as soul within the community of World Soul. This may be
experienced as a surrender into the self-organizing nature of the authentic, evolving
self. The central guiding question is, “What is your experience, what is its meaning and
purpose for you, and how is it to be enacted in the world, in the service of life?” The goal
of HEP is for individuals to be fully alive and enacting their own unique potential while
contributing to the culture, in a respectful and wondrous relationship with nature,
responsibly aware of their place in the living cosmos.
HEP is a twenty-first century, embodied, existential, psychodynamic, archetypal
spirituality that locates itself in a cultural, ecological and cosmological context. With its
roots in the nineteenth century Romantic existential tradition and twentieth century
humanistic depth psychology, HEP is a model for the facilitation of the evolution of
complex, holistic identity. This theme is based in the transgressive drive for personal
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freedom via the intense, unmediated desire to know one’s self, and to be known by the
other, beyond the boundaries of the socially sanctioned and personally validated self.
This gives rise to an awareness of unlimited possibilities for evolution, but also of
finitude, limitation, adversity, and death. This is the transpersonal basis of deep,
complex individual identity and the evolution of that identity in Western culture, the
defining archetypal theme of individuality in HEP.
In the HEP Method, this translates simply as Joseph Campbell’s aphorism “I
greet you and wish you joy in your sorrows.” It also translates, more complexly, as a
sobering reflection on the goals and outcome of personal evolution – not to idealistically
strive to go beyond the pain and suffering of life, but to accept it as part of life, an
ecstatic limitation through which we realize a unique individuality, the central theme in
the apophatic mystical tradition. HEP recognizes this as the hidden mystical theme in
the twentieth century postmodern tradition of ironic, relativistic, indefinite identity, an
identity forever in search of itself, a dérive of never arriving that is paradoxically a
“sovereign self consciousness that, precisely no longer turns away from itself… a self-
consciousness that does not turn away when it is time to explore possibility to the limit.”
(Bataille, p?). This ‘sovereign self consciousness’ is the foundation and the goal in the
HEP facilitation of individual evolution.
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The HEP Model

The HEP Method was originally developed as a psychotherapy method. The
account given here of The HEP Method is as it pertains to the evolution of an
individual. It can, however, be applied to the evolution of any dynamic energetic
system that maintains an identity while interacting with an environment – a family,
an organization, a culture, a species – what Prigogine calls a “dissipative
structure”, a structure with internal complexity and a complex relationship with its
environment, such that it takes in and disperses energy.
The working model is called experiential in that the chief focus of all endeavours
is the deepening of the experiential sense of self, via directed intensification of the
phenomena of inner experience, and mapping that experience onto various paradigms,
disciplines and traditions. The focus may begin anywhere in the experiential field. It
may be a dream, a memory from the past, or a story of what happened yesterday at
work. It may be a thought, an image, a sensation, a feeling, an emotion. Once the
experiential focus is defined, the facilitator’s task is amplification, intensification,
deepening, reflection. Techniques of psychodynamic introspection, encounter or gestalt
exercises, primal psychophysical release, art expression, psychodramatic enactment or
transpersonal practices may be used
The working model is holistic in that its overview is systemic, organismic,
holonomic, evolutionary and transpersonal. It incorporates both the Jungian idea of an
individuating Self and the persistent diversity of the archetypal, polytheistic perspective.
It is dialectic and integrative, moving from contradiction to paradox. Its focus is
inclusive, in that it sees the complementary nature of opposites and the one in the
many. In The HEP Method, phenomenology is said to manifest ontology and ontology
to ground phenomenology. From the holographic paradigm and chaos theory, it takes
the perspective of wholeness which relates part and whole in a fractal, scaling, self
similar manner, across all levels and states of the whole.
In the holistic experiential process approach, ultimately, what counts is
experience, meaning and action – what is your experience, what is its meaning and
purpose for you and how is it to be enacted in the world, in the service of life? The
creation of meaning by mapping of evoked experience onto various traditions that apply
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to different aspects of the human condition is a key part of this particular experiential
approach. The experience-mapping cycle creates an evolutionary dynamic in which
new experience challenges the parameters of the current reality map of the participant
(this reality map, most basically, concerns issues such as the sense of self identity,
self/other relationships, place of self in life, relation of self to environment, meaning of
life for self). This challenge creates dissonance in the reality map, which is experienced
as chaos, symptom, suffering, dis-ease. The HEP Method takes this series of
challenges to its phenomenological end point, and in so doing completes a gestalt that
is, most basically, a kind of ego death and self resurrection theme. In this process, the
various chaotic, divisive contradictions of the participant’s experience of life become
resolved into the inclusive paradox of increasing wholeness, without, necessarily,
eliminating the tension of opposites. Thus evolution of the self takes place. This
experience-mapping cycle is the dialectic core of The HEP Method.
From a felt sense of meaning created through the experience mapping cycle
comes a felt sense of purpose, which moves the participant toward action in the world.
This felt sense of purpose is an experience that goes beyond the self understanding
provided by meaning and suggests what is to be done in the world, based on the newly
discovered identity revealed by the experience of meaning. This may be a change in
how one treats oneself, lifestyle changes or major events such as career change. The
focus of one’s life may change toward a more social orientation or a more personal
orientation depending on dialectic evolution of past characterological tendencies.
Eventually, however, a desire to be of service to one’s community and culture emerges.
Ultimately this translates into service to life itself in some way. Some people become
socially and politically active, while others serve through the medium of their daily lives.
The bottom line is an attitude shift toward participation in life with a major focus on
action – what is to be done?
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HEP Process, Aims and Goals

The HEP Method involves a deconstructing and reconstructing of one’s
personality and life that provides access to mystical themes in personal and collective
evolution. It is a deep and challenging process that results in becoming fully present in
life, realizing the gifts of unique individuality, finding soul satisfying work, having
relationships that are satisfying, being attuned to spiritual nature, attending to health
and lifestyle needs and making a contribution to community and culture. People
involved in HEP find a deep acceleration and clarification in their transformational work.
They find that painful memories and repetitive patterns no longer exert the same
compulsive force and power over their behaviour and life circumstances that they once
did. Often a clearing of significant psychological and life disturbances, including
physical health problems, will be experienced. Many graduates from The HEP Method
will attest to this. Some people, however, only need or want to undertake a part of this
process. There are opportunities throughout the process where people will naturally
reach a level of accomplishment in self understanding and authentic living that will
enable them to step out into a new life. There is support for participants to make these
kinds of decisions, and also to go as far as they possibly can to fully realize their unique
individual human and divine potential.
An immediate aim of HEP is a deepening self awareness, so that the process
becomes a process of self discovery, as the participant moves deeper and deeper into
the experiential sense of self. As this happens, problems and symptoms resolve into
gateways or doorways to self knowledge. In this context, pathologizing is seen as a set
of signs or indicators as to what the deeper layers of the psyche are throwing up for
consideration in the process of “soul making”, as defined in archetypal psychology. In
this process the various chaotic, divisive contradictions of the participant’s experience of
life become resolved into the inclusive paradox of increasing wholeness, without,
necessarily, eliminating the tension of opposites. Thus evolution of the self takes place
as a goal of HEP.
Challenge is a big part of HEP work. Trust in the safety net of evolving personal
truth and the synchronistic, existential ground of being is encouraged. There is a strong
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emphasis on the point of view which says that the conscious, ego self and the
unconscious, synchronistic Self both have a valid perspective, method, plan, pattern
and purpose, and that they interact dialectically. This perspective encourages people to
trust their unconscious, instinctive, intuitive dynamic, and go with the flow, as well as
form intentions, make plans and follow through with discipline and commitment. The
integration of this into a lifestyle is a major long term goal of HEP.
A significant theme in The HEP Method is recognizing and working with the
event/ experience polarity. This suggests that when an evolutionary issue is being
constellated in an individual, it occurs both as an event in the world and as an inner
experience. Typically, because an evolutionary constellating issue involves disowned
painful psychological material, we do not wish to have the experience. So there is a
knock on the door –an event occurs in our lives to remind us of the need for an inner
experience. This model draws on Jung and Pauli’s notion of synchronicity, where there
is seen to be a meaningful relationship between inner and outer world via what
Paracelsus, Goethe and the Hermetic Western Mystery Tradition call the “doctrine of
correspondences”. It also draws on Brooke’s archetypal phenomenological model of
the unconscious as having extension as well as depth. HEP ultimately involves a
surrender into life such that a person’s sense of identity extends beyond the ‘skin
encapsulated ego’ (Watts) into the life world of the World Soul, Anima Mundi.
One end point of the HEP process is the full realization of characterization, i.e.
that we are characters in a life story, and that through our story of characterization an
authorial intent is being enacted. In this process of surrender into the victimization of
utter characterization, in this ego death, a Self resurrection occurs. Not the self of the
character or the self of the author, but rather the characterized author as the authorized
character, expressed through the author’s characterological story. A resurrection that is
also a mystical birth which reveals the self conceived nature of one’s life story. In HEP it
is said that ‘author creates character and character reveals the author’s
characterological story, through the authentic lived world of story.’ This recapitulates the
Sufi theme of the cocreative relationship between the generative father, who conceives
of the all, and the gestational mother, who gives birth to the all from the atemporal, non
local, quantum, archetypal world in which conception and birth are co-eternal. The
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Sufi’s say, “my mother gave birth to her father” and “the mystic gives birth to the divinity
whose passion it is to be known by the mystic”. This lived world of story is the
integrating dialectic of the soul, the celestial earth of Ibn’ Arabi, the Mundus Imaginalis,
the quaternity as completion of the evolutionary differentiation of a primary original unity,
as given in the Axiom of Maria.
As in Romanyshyn’s archetypal psychology account of Bachelard’s and Merleau-
Ponty’s work, HEP is a radical phenomenology of the sensuous world, releasing the
imaginal trapped in the “literalism of fact” and the “dogmatism of thought”. In this it is a
mystical psychology of the embodied heart –the cosmological heart of the soul, whose
centre is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.
Nowhere. No where. Now here.
Thus we see HEP moving from the ego identification with character to self
identification with the lived world of the author/character dialectic of story, and ultimately
to a mystical psychology of cosmos, in which we undertake, in Bamford’s words, “the
Great Work of redemption of the scattered sparks of light in the darkness of every
perception” – a clarification of the no where of the heart of the cosmos into the now here
of one’s lived life as Homo Dei Cosmopolitos. Bamford’s singular no place of Mundus
Imaginalis, subjectivity, the ‘clime to which one cannot point’ (Bamford).
HEP is a crucible and container for transformation via nigredo (darkening),
putrefactio (rotting), mortificatio (dying). These are alchemical metaphors for
transforming leaden deadness into the radiant gold of manifest potential. This requires
a vessel. Such a vessel is provided by immersion in the matrix of the relationships of a
group, in a bath of the waters of the unconscious, in the container of the process itself.
One of the central experiences of this alchemical containment in HEP is “being in hell” –
the dark underworld hell state of self alienation, self deception, self denial. Not being at
one with one’s ground of being (self alienation), one’s historical and present
circumstances (self deception), one’s needs (self denial). Lacking at-one-ment. This
self alienation is what in the Christian tradition Tillich calls sin. In a state of separation
from one’s ground of being we are not at one with our Divine nature, our authenticity. In
this sense we are dead and separate from meaning and purpose. Deadness,
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hopelessness, despair are characteristic of this state. At its deepest, it is a feeling of

eternal damnation.
Typically this hell state within our deadness involves a sense of unfairness. ‘What
did I do to deserve this?’ ‘It’s not fair’ ‘I didn’t do it’. The circumstances (whether present
or historic) that seem to have put us in ‘hell’ do not seem to be our ‘fault’ and we seem
to have no control over their occurrence, especially if they are historic (e.g. family) or in
a place where we feel intimidated (e.g. school) or powerless (e.g. job loss because of
economic climate).
HEP involves discovering habits and tendencies of thought, feeling and
behaviour that directly or indirectly create seemingly circumstantial reality, which then
impacts on us as if we had nothing to do with creating it. HEP also involves developing
the discrimination to not continue to reside in circumstances that deny who we are and
interfere with our life work. HEP supports being able to say ‘no’ and to separate out.
The ultimate mystical HEP challenge, however, that transforms the deepest self
alienation of a fiery hell state over which we have no control, is to simply take
responsibility for it as part of one’s story. ‘I didn’t cause this, I have no control over it, it’s
not fair and yet it is part of my story.’ How do we take responsibility for something over
which we have no control? Through humility, the humiliation of mortificatio – repeated
thematic occurrences of mortifying failure and suffering, which ultimately leads to an
identification with authorial story through our objectifying characterization as the
subjective sufferer.
This is a move which cannot be accomplished simply by reading about it,
believing it or holding an opinion. We must viscerally come to it, through the putrefying
defensive primal struggle against it. Scream, whine, plead our case for innocence,
victimization and injustice. Rotten with rage we cry out against it all until we give up the
ghost in despair, relinquishing egoic control in favour of surrender into the necessary
inevitability of excruciating containment in our particular destiny. In this moment of what
the Sufi’s call fanā’, divine and human disappear into each other and we become our
own saviour. In HEP, as in Dante’s inferno, at the bottom of hell is purgatory – purging,
cleansing, refreshment. In this transformation of hell into purgatory, we take
responsibility for what doesn’t feel like our fault and over which we have no control, but
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which, nevertheless, is part of our story. We are forgiven by recovering our response –
ability and our heart opens even as it is pierced by the world and we take responsibility
for the alien “other” by accepting that, “yes, I am this too”.
‘Eternal damnation’ becomes ‘redemption’ by surrendering denial and refusal.
Atonement is attained by surrendering alienation. Then all you need is love. Love of
what is. Forgiveness ultimately follows through faith, which we may lack but which,
through understanding and courage, we may bring to the moment of defeat. In the
surrender of “not my will but Thy will be done”, there is a paradoxical liberation. No
longer are we lamenting not having the life we want, because we now want the life we
have. And not only do we want the life we have but hidden Plutonic treasures are
revealed – hidden under the dragon’s tale. Hidden resources we forgot we had or that
looked like something else other than treasure. The Hymn of Jesus from the Gospel of
John says “If you knock on me I will be a door. If you are a traveler I will be a road. If
you look at me I will be a lamp. If you see me I will be a mirror”. This is our life
speaking to us through the depths of our alienation and despair.
One of the recurrent mystical themes in the HEP author/character,
event/experience, transformational model is that of fate – those irreducible themes in
our lives which change us rather than are changed by us. HEP validates and develops
the ego position of striving with skill and means to accomplish personally set goals,
using discipline, intelligence, foresight and planning, including such things as intuitive
methods, lateral thinking, visualization, mantra and meditation. Sometimes however,
our best laid plans repeatedly go astray and are defeated by “circumstances”. Then we
must look inside to see what fatal story is being played out in our world. A key HEP
theme is a reversal of causality model. Typically we believe “I feel or am this way
because of my life” – including present circumstances and past history, social setting
and even archetypal context. In the causality reversal model the sequence becomes
“because my life story is trying to make me aware of a deeply buried set of feelings or
aspect of self, it constellates circumstances and events to ‘create’ the experience or to
bring the self structure into focus”.
The model of connection then becomes pattern rather than causality, story rather
than event or circumstance. What this ultimately does is deliteralize events and
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empower the victimized, marginalized character as the agent of the authorial centre, the
basis of the storyline of events and circumstances. The question then becomes not the
helpless victimization of “why is this always happening to me?” and “why is everybody
always picking on me?” but the fatal, transpersonal identity question “who am I that my
life should occur to me in this way?” which ultimately leads to the service oriented
question, “what is my life asking of me?” This realization of the life serving function of
the fatal themes in our life is a fundamental goal of HEP.
The essence of the Christ myth applies here, where the crucifixion and death
experience is referred to as ‘the passion’. In this myth, Christ is not a victim but a ‘world’
Saviour – by surrendering personal will to transpersonal will. For not only is it the life
we live that we must attend to, but the life that lives through us. Ultimately it is the lived
world itself that lives. The Unus Mundus of the Mundus Imaginalis, the Anima Mundi
that lives through our life, through our authentic aliveness. The unitary nature of the
imaginal world of the world soul. This further leads to the possibility that we are not only
agents of our own individual evolution but also, actually, through this individual
evolution, agents of Divine evolution. Corbet speaks of the religious functions of the
psyche, suggesting that individual human development over the lifespan, as well as
manifesting latent personal potential through conscious choice in relationship, involves
an embodiment of the Self as a personal spiritual and psychological experience of God,
what in HEP is called the homo dei experience. Jung in Answer to Job proposes that
the human condition bears the burden of enacting Divinities’ conscious transformation
as human existential suffering. In this process we realize that the world, which has
seemed to be the solid foundation of our being, is equally a construct of our self created
awareness.
At this time of crises and opportunity, in the postmodern chaotic quantum
relativity of the century that exploded, the known myths do not endure. Now the
mythogenetic zone is the individual human heart, bound to the utmost within the matrix
of planetary consciousness, in service to the cosmic alien other. Then the mystical
question becomes “what is to be done in the world”. A desire to be of service to one’s
community, culture and the world emerges. Ultimately this translates into service to life
itself in some way. Some people become socially and politically active, while others
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serve through the medium of their daily lives. Participants in the later stages of HEP
move into the world with a new sense of identity, purpose, meaning, values, attitudes
and a strong desire to participate in and contribute to social and collective issues,
coupled with an individualistic stance that is not hyperboundaried and separatist. A full
manifestation of potential is a key focus in this phase. Ultimately, the approach to life is
participatory yet individually responsible; flexible and yet strongly centred in a sense of
self; mystical and yet grounded and pragmatic.
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Romantic Mysticism in the HEP Method

Romanticism is a movement that began in philosophy, literature and the arts toward the
end of the eighteenth century. It emphasized imagination, passion, spirituality, and
emotion over intellect and reason. According to Max Blechman in Revolutionary
Romanticism, in it’s earliest form in Germany (Frűhromantik), it was politically
revolutionary, partaking of the spirit catalyzed in the French Revolution. These early
romantics considered imaginative aesthetics and spirituality as a creative counterpart to
the Enlightenment force of rational criticism and the emerging focus on uniformity and
duty. They wished to elaborate a world view that emphasized the metaphysical and
reconstructive power of nature, love, freedom, community and poetry.
The early German romantics conceived of poetic activity as a powerful metaphor
and catalyst for spiritual renewal and political change. Novalis speaks of a “poetic
state”(6). Friederich Schlegel, who wrote many early romantic philosophical and critical
aphorisms, says this of the connection between spirituality and politics, “The
revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God on earth is the elastic point of
progressive civilization and the beginning of modern history.”(5) They considered
language to be creative in its signifying aspect, in that perception can be said to ‘create’
reality, and language defines perceptual possibilities. Many creation myths have the
utterance of speech as the original act of creation. MacLagan in Creation Myths puts it
this way, “The idea of ‘speech’ in all it's richness, conveys a sense of the world as an
immense texture of different articulations which interlock to each other by analogical or
metaphorical correspondences.”(31) Poetry, as the most distilled essence of speech,
can then be seen to enact creation, as in the Kabalistic view of the creative power of the
word of the Torah. The word poetry comes from the root meaning “to make”. Poetry,
then, can be seen as artistic enactment of “the world as (a) script of divine
utterance.”(29) It was, quite literally, the beauty of the poetic structure of the Koran that
gave it such a power to move listeners to devotion and action. The early romantics
wished to take poetry forward from the classical notion of accomplishment to a “poetry
of yearning” (Bennet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, 872), based in desire and passion, in
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which we must first understand and appreciate the work on it’s own terms i.e. participate
in the work. These are fundamental existential and phenomenological romantic themes
as incorporated into HEP.
The early romantics also considered poetic language to be close to the beauty of
nature. They thus considered poetry to be mystically capable of bringing the order of
nature into an ordering of human affairs, not only as culture but also as politics, which
they wished to define as an aesthetic relationship between communally bonded
individuals. In this aesthetic approach to the politics of community, they drew on the
notion of Eros as that which binds disparate individual elements together in a social
unity. The early romantics emphasized Eros as constellating wholeness, particularly in
the relationship between human freedom and nature. According to Blechman, for
romantics, “love is the ‘magic’ principle that connects the visible to the aesthetic
invisible, that unites organic beings in their different modes of being, anticipating Freud’s
speculation that it is love that assures the cohesion of our elements”.(8)
The romantics emphasized “difference, irony, individuality and interpretation as a
necessary complement to tradition and positive meaning.” They aspired to “give greater
depth and meaning to the cosmopolitan ideal of universal freedom and equality.” There
is an anarchic theme in the early German romantic view of culture, politics, art and
community, articulated by Schlegel as “anarchy… is an ideal, which can only be found
through approximation. These conditions are only to be found in an opposition, not in
an absolute but a relative opposition. Namely, freedom is the ideal, we approach it
through lawfulness. But does lawfulness not conflict with freedom? The contradiction is
resolved when lawfulness is decided by freedom, so that a relative freedom arises.”(16)
This principle intuitively guided the formation of the early HEP group style and the
community that arose from it, in which community was enacted as a sort of “aesthetic
creation” not determined by “societie’s impersonal political hierarchies.”(15)
According to Martin Green in Revolutionary Romantics, these romantic aesthetic
community aspirations were realized in the Bohemian counterculture that flourished at
Ascona from 1900 to 1920. The residents of Ascona espoused a revolutionary lifestyle,
based in anarchic communality, creativity, eros, embodiment, goddess worship (there
are many shrines to the Black Madonna in the area and women were central figure in
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this community), nature worship and Pagan rather than Christian values. They rejected
the world of “war – mad bureaucrats, administrations, and academics who wore
professorial beards and official decorations on their breasts… (with their) weapons of
war and their tablets of the law.” (169) They “rebelled against both family and marriage”
(174) They wished to do this by “changing everyone’s idea of life” (171). Otto Gross,
one of the most notorious of these counter culture figures, was a psychoanalyst and
also a prominent cultural figure. He was analyzed by C.G. Jung in 1908. They spent
whole days together and Gross sometimes analyzed Jung when he got stuck in his
analysis of Gross. Many associated with Ascona were artists, writers, dancers. Some
became famous (Herman Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan, Paul
Tillich) but most expressed themselves in their living rather than in their legacy. Their
idealism is shown in the name of the hill on which Ascona’s one institution, a nature
cure sanatorium, was built by a group of vegetarians. They call it Monte Verità –
Mountain of Truth. Starting in 1933 Ascona hosted the Eranos meetings of scholars of
religion, which included Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Karl Kerenyi, Mercia Eliade
and C.G. Jung. The first Eranos volume of collected papers was dedicated to the Great
Mother.
In the radical commitment to relative freedom, within relative lawfulness and
relative lawlessness, Schlegel encourages us to follow the “norm of nature.”(20) He
called the “mysterious causality behind the beauty of organized nature” the “causality of
love”(20), and suggested it exists in us all. He also suggested that this could be self
realized (i.e. awareness of this would be self arising and self organizing) in a community
which valued individual freedom i.e. in a community in which there was minimal
necessary regulation and an “unpredictable mobility that, ideally, would reveal a unity.”
Ultimately, for the romantics, individuality within community was the ideal that permitted
the “norm of nature” as the “causality of love” to emerge. According to Schlegel “only
through love and the consciousness of love does a person become a person.”(23)
Blechman extends this as follows “it is love that draws the individual to realize his or her
calling in a community, and it is love that pushes a community to realize it’s vocation to
be free.”(23) Blechman, drawing on Todorov, puts the relationship between naturalness,
freedom, wholeness and art this way “If nature is the wholeness of beauty produced by
 18

spontaneous powers, art can be the translation of this wholeness into culture and
political freedom”(25), and Novalis suggests “every person should be an artist.” This is
a fundamental theme in HEP.
The existential/phenomenological and humanistic ideal of wholeness and
freedom from limitations is given by Schlegel in his account of romantic culture, which
he suggest “means being almost unaware of being free in all directions and from all
sides; means living one’s whole humanity; means holding sacred whatever acts, is and
develops, according to the measure of one’s power; means taking part in all aspects of
life and not letting oneself be seduced by limited options.” This is a direct antecedent of
both the humanistic and existential/phenomenological traditions as they have been
incorporated into HEP philosophy and psychotherapeutic methodology.
The continued postmodern relevance of the romantic tradition, as incorporated into HEP
sociopolitical and cultural views, deeply concerns this dialectic of the relationship
between individuality and community, through the themes of freedom and the norm of
nature as manifest through self arising, self organizing emergence, in a minimally
structured environment of responsible permissiveness. According to Blechman, this
relevance extends to the larger society through the explosive impact of new forms of
imagination in late 20th century art and literature, “the existential crisis of the isolated self
and the widespread institutionalization of psychoanalysis”(29) The relevance also
extends through the archetypal form of depth psychology into a critique of the heroic
dominator/saviour theme in Western culture. [expand]
With its roots in an embodied, humanistic, existential tradition and the neurophysiology
of bodily drives, psychoanalysis is quintessentially romantic. The romantic tradition, as
it further developed in the nineteenth century, focused on direct, immediate experience,
valuing aspects usually defined as sinful or evil by mainstream Christian culture, but
opened up for investigation by psychoanalysis — conflict, darkness, morbidity, depth,
personal particularity, emotion, physical passion, sensation, sexuality. The romantic
fascination with the mythological underworld of repressed desires, images and
experiences, while being quintessentially forbidden in mainstream society, is the
essence of psychoanalysis, in its genesis. In this it evoked a particular focus on eros
and thanatos. Another key psychodynamic romantic theme is boundary dissolution,
 19

most obviously that of the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious.
There was, however, a general dissolution of the rigid codification of social mores taking
place in fin de siècle Europe that the emergence of psychoanalysis was a part of. At the
First Vatican Council (1870) the Catholic Church responded to the romantic linking of
psychology, philosophy and religion by “anathematizing the romantic – idealist
philosophical tradition, which the church rightly perceived to imply a natural intimacy
between the divine and the human” (Dourley, The Illness That We Are). At the same
council the infallibility of the Pope was declared, reflecting the potential power of
romanticism to challenge the social structrue of Europe. The overwhelming explosive
impact of the slaughter of WWI, conducted in the name of a supposedly rational
society’s political interests, completed the deconstruction of royal Europe’s imperial iron
grip on the collective psyche of it’s subjects. This period, continuing up into the roaring
20’s, could be seen as a series of massive upsurges of the European unconscious as a
manifestation of this boundary dissolution theme. In addition, the psychoanalytic impact
of moving Western culture’s understanding of human nature from a religious to a
psychological basis is radical, fundamental and deeply romantic.
Goethe and Nietzsche, major figures of the nineteenth century romantic tradition,
were both inspirational to Freud and Jung. Goethe’s humanist poem Prometheus
insists that humanity believe in humanity and not in gods. He also espoused the holism
of the romantic tradition in that, in his science work, he attempted to see individual
phenomena as part of an organic developing whole. His Faust was a source of
inspiration for Jung, who saw in it an explication of the central challenge of twentieth
century European culture – the dangers of the will to ‘power over’ rather than
‘relationship with’. This is an abiding theme in the humanistic/existential and
phenomenological traditions. Jung also described Goethe’s Faust as a work of depth
psychology in that “Goethe is really describing the experience of the alchemist who
discovers that what he has projected into the retort is his own darkness, his
unredeemed state, his passion, his struggle to reach his goal i.e. to become what he
really is.” This is a cogent description of the working through theme in depth
psychology and of transference as the basis of the Jungian project of individuation.
 20

Nietzsche continually sought to penetrate beyond all rational, systematic schemes to

the irrational, human level beneath, as in his Beyond Good and Evil. He was influenced
by Schopenhauer and Bachofen in his views on the tragic Dionysian nature of life.
Nietzsche preferred the willingness to suffer, consciousness of sin, and humility rather
than Wagnerian, heroic, operatic grandiosity. Nietzsche’s account of romantic
inspiration is quintessentially experiential, as quoted in The Left Hand of God. “(Then)
one became two. I became another and a stranger to myself. Escaped from myself. A
wrestler who overcame himself. Suddenly with unspeakable certainty and subtlety,
something becomes visible, audible, shakes one to his depths and overthrows him… An
ecstasy (which) dissolves into a flood of tears. Involuntarily, one runs sometimes…
(with) innumerable subtle shivers and tingling all the way down to the toes. A depth of
happiness, in which what is most painful and gloomiest strikes us, not as antithetical,
but as called for, a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light. An instinct for
rhythmic relationships… Whereby I sang and spoke nonsense, lit up by a new glance…
Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree, but as though in a tempest
stirred up by a sense of freedom, by unconditionality, by power, by divinity… I bear the
destiny of mankind on my shoulders… Now and then the thought occurs to me that I
really live an extremely dangerous life, for I belong to the machines that crack apart.”
This description of romantic, literary “Inspiration” (also known as “Genius”) is distinctly
reminiscent of medieval mystics (such as the beguines and St. Francis), Holy Spirit
experiences and the ‘getting in spirit’ of Pentecostal revival meetings. It also could
describe a Kundalini yoga/Tantra spiritual emergence experience and the depths of
body oriented experiential psychotherapies such as holotropic breathwork and
transpersonal primal therapy.
The romantic Nature Philosophers, who expressed the Hermetic idea of an
inner/outer correspondence and the possibility of knowing the nature of human nature
through studying Nature, also prefigure depth psychology, especially the Jungian
approach. Nature as a web of correspondences requiring a symbolic attitude for
understanding, and a complex holistic view of reality as being multilevel and
polymorphic, are deeply Jungian. In Access to Western Esotericism, Faivre gives this
account of Naturphilosophie “Here are the three common denominators or essential
 21

characteristics of Naturphilosophie. 1) A conception of Nature as a text to decipher by

correspondences. Nature is filled with symbolic implications; its signification resides
outside itself, so much so that rigorous science is only a necessary point of departure
for an inclusive grasp of invisible processes, i.e., a ‘nature naturing’. 2.) A taste for the
living concrete and for a plural universe. Natur-philosophers are all more or less
specialists (chemists, physicists, geologists, engineers, physicians), but specialists
whose thought rises to eclectic syntheses and tries to embrace a polymorphic world
comprised of different levels of reality in its complexity. The compartmentalization of
Nature into separate categories, characteristic of a (mechanistic imagination), gives way
to the attempt to grasp the whole animated by dynamic polarities. 3) The identity of
Spirit and Nature, considered as two seeds of common root (matter and Nature rest on
a spiritual principle, for spirit inhabits them). By the same token, knowledge of Nature
and knowledge of oneself go hand in hand. A scientific fact is perceived as a sign, the
signs correspond, concepts borrowed from chemistry are transposed into astronomy or
human feelings.” (83)
The existential philosophy of Hegel, essentially Romantic in character, helped
form the basis of Freud and Jung’s dialectical understanding of psychic structure,
psychodynamics and psychological evolution. Hegel’s dialectic, dynamic understanding
of history is the same as the psychodynamic and humanistic/existential understanding
of individual evolution, as being fostered by the evocation and engagement of dialectic
polarities in the psyche. This has been particularly elaborated in Gestalt and Jungian
psychotherapy and is a central theme in HEP theory and practice.
Schopenhauer’s Romantic focus on the irrational motivation of the primordial force of a
deep universal world Will prefigured the idea of both the personal and collective
unconscious. He considered that desire created pain and suffering in the world. He
suggested the only solution for this was a negation of the will to live through
renunciation of desire, thus promoting what, in mainstream cultural terms, would be
considered as a drive toward egoic destructuring and ultimately toward death in the
existential sense, what Freud and Lacan came to call the death drive.
Freud spoke of transforming metaphysics into metapsychology and of changing
the supernatural mythological world view of religion, which is “nothing but psychology
 22

projected into the external world,…back once more by science into the psychology of
the unconscious “ (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 258). The Freudian rewriting of
the oedipal myth is an example of this. According to Merkur, “the myths whose
metaphysics Freud reduced to metapsychology belonged…to German Romanticism”
(Psychoanalytic Study of Society vol. 18, 1993, 345). Merkur quotes a number of
historical sources to show that Freud was influenced by Romanticism during his
undergraduate days at the University of Vienna in the 1870’s, with its pervasively
romantic atmosphere. This included a direct exposure to Naturephilosophie in
coursework and indirectly to Wagner, Mahler, Schopenhauer, and especially Nietzsche,
in discussion groups.
Various authors specifically suggest Romanticism was the source for Freud’s
analogical reasoning style, his tendency to personify nature, his openness to the
irrational, his orientation to the individual, his theories of libido and his account of
Sophocles Oedipus Rex.
Merkur presents extensive references as to the romantic basis of Freud’s notion
of the unconscious. “Freud was not the discoverer of the unconscious. A long lineage,
passing amongst others through the romantic philosophers, Schelling, Hegel,
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had postulated the existence of the unconscious”(349).
He quotes Friederich Schelling (as related by Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud)
specifically. Schelling had developed the doctrine, “that one organizing principle must
pervade both the physical world and consciousness, but that outside our own
awareness this principle is not itself conscious. This unifying principle of organization
and productivity operates without awareness in the determinism of nature, and with
awareness in our sense of freedom. We have to use our awareness to infer this
principle where we are not directly aware of it, both in the rest of nature, and in the
unconscious formative processes of our own minds. (p.125)” In the Hermetic view of a
unified macrocosm/microcosm, this unconscious would be the specific place of “contact
of the individual with the universal powers of nature.” (Whyte, 69) This has been
particularly taken up by Jungian and archetypal psychology.
Another very specific connection is made by Merkur. “Freud’s preference for
dualism was a legacy of Romantic mythology.” (325) Romantic dualities include
 23

Bachofen’s Dionysian/Apollonian principles and spiritual alchemy’s moon/sun,

silver/gold, mercury/sulphur, woman/man, water/fire, cold/heat, death/life dualities.
Spiritual alchemy can be traced from Paracelsus in the 16 th century, through the
Rosicrucians and Jacob Boehme, to Goethe and German Romanticism in the 19 th
century. Although Freud, in his preference for dualism, never took up these specific
dualities per se, Jung, particularly through his reading of Alchemy, did so. Schelling
postulated dualism in God, as containing “the transcendent God within Himself and the
immanent God in His role as creator” (354) and extended this to a perception of nature
as pervasively dualistic. Schelling, echoing Hegel, suggest that this duality must be
viewed in a dialectic relation to unity – “it is not enough to merely discern the antithesis,
if the unity of the essence is not recognized at the same time” (The Ages of the World,
98). Nietzsche used the Dionysian/Apollonian model of Bachofen extensively in The
Birth of Tragedy, ultimately, however, preferring rapturous Dionysian intoxication and the
tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles. He identified the Dionysian principle as “secret
and unconscious” (357). Freud’s “scientific secularization of Romanticism’s bipolar
metaphysics” (357) is fundamental to all psychodynamic psychology, including Jungian
and archetypal psychology, and has been taken up variously by a number of other
psychoanalytic writers, including Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse. In its
evolutionary form, this model is dialectic i.e. evolved self identity is seen to emerge as
an integrating synthetic third out of dualistic tensions held creatively. This is also
fundamental to the humanistic/existential tradition and to HEP.
The concept and practice of romantic irony is basic to the HEP transpersonal
tradition as it incorporates the Jungian ego/Self evolutionary relationship in
individuation. Romantic irony (established as a literary technique in the early 19 th
century) is, in essence, the literary version of an individual’s transition from ego
identification with victimized character structure and given storyline, to identification
with the evolutionary creative authorial power of Self – that which creates and provides
authority for the characteristic ego, setting it also in an evolutionary challenging story
line. Although this sounds like a classic creator/creature//God/human motif, in romantic
irony the typical order of the world is upset, and the character, for example, announces
within the story that the author has died and that the character will continue the story.
 24

Romantic irony contains the theme of the dawning of an awareness of the creation of
one’s life as a story emerging out of itself, having no authority beyond itself i.e. in
romantic irony, the authority for character and story is contained within character and
story. This experience is central to the HEP existential crisis point of the victimized
suffering of the ultimate aloneness of self responsibility ‘I alone am myself and I alone
am responsible for my life’. A common ironic technique is for statements about a work
to be contained within the work, or to embody a theory of the novel within the novel.
This corresponds to the individual’s continually evolving psychotherapeutic
understanding of the process of his or her own self creation from within the created self,
a key psychodynamic and humanistic/existential theme and fundamental to HEP. A
central goal of any experiential psychotherapy is the facilitation of the individual’s
understanding of the origins of how he or she comes into being through experiential
insight, based in the experience of one’s self, i.e. to give an experience of one’s origins
psychologically from within the psyche. HEP provides an a intensely focused approach
to this, in taking people to the full depths of their being, where the primal remnants of
their individual creation can be (re) experienced, thus giving them access to their own
authorial power to create their life story as congruently expressive of their deep self.
HEP eschews the simply transcendental implications of this formulation, however, by
insisting that access to authorial creativity can only authentically come through the
abject victimization of characterologic suffering i.e. we become responsible in an
authorial sense only by surrendering any notion of control over the characterological
exposition of story line as authorial intent.
This co-creative literary theme is given exquisite expression in Pirandello’s Six
Characters in Search of an Author (1921), where six characters (members of a classic
dysfunctional family) go in search of a new author to continue writing their story after
their original author has lost interest. They encounter an acting troupe in rehearsal and
take over the authorial position, convincing the actors to enact their story. In doing this,
the play then becomes an exposition of characterological assumption of authorial
function. The characters coach the actors as they specify their own characterization.
There is a strong theme in the play, of characters as having an existence equal with,
and autonomous from, the author. The play gives an account of how, in authorial
 25

reverie, the characters appear before the author, attempting to seduce the author into
writing their story, i.e. the author is an agency of characterization, initiated by character.
This is reminiscent of Sartre’s existential aphorism “existence precedes essence.” In
the experiential phenomenology of the HEP discovery of self creation and self
authorization, this statement is fundamental.
Romantic irony became a major theme in late twentieth century Western culture,
as the implications of quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, post modernism,
globalization, multiculturalism, the return of ancient spiritual traditions (including the
mythology of the UFO/alien phenomena and the psychedelic revolution) and the general
apocalyptic tenor of the times (including the devastating impact of 100 million dead in
two world wars, the atomic bomb, threatened environmental collapse) pervasively settle
into popular culture. It is perhaps most accessibly exemplified however, in movies such
as Robert Altman’s The Player, Sally Polter’s The Tango Lesson, Tom de Cilo’s Living in
Oblivion, The Warshasky Brother’s The Matrix, David Cronenberg’s Ekzistenz, Fellini’s
8 1/2, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. All
these movies explicitly examine the phenomena of a ‘reality’ that is seemingly
secondary and derivative, which co-creatively intermingles with a more ontological
primary ‘reality’, such that the ontological primacy and secondary phenomenology are
indistinguishable, and even seem interchangeable. In HEP, this translates as an
attempt to reveal the deep (typically unconscious) dream-like creative nature of waking
life, and to bring fully aware consciousness to this dream level of reality.
Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (directed by Spike Jonze) is a complex
interweaving of a movie about making a movie about the reality of adapting the
adaptation of a real life story into an adaptation for a movie. As complicated as this
particular piece of romantic irony sounds, the actual depiction of author/character
interplay in this movie is even more complex. Kaufman, the writer of Being John
Malkovich and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is expert at making this interplay of
fantasy and reality seem natural, believable, intelligent, witty and entertaining, without
losing a sense of the deep complexity of the co-creative author/character tension. The
HEP model of author/character self discovery understands and accepts this complexity
and, without attempting to make it simplistic, attempts to experientially vivify it so that
 26

individuals undergoing HEP can discover the empowerment of authorial intent in the
victimization of the characterological suffering of their life. One simple version of this is
the idea of refining the story of one’s life from dime store pulp fiction into an authentic
tragicomedy. This is a Shakespearian, participatory, literary model rather than a
transcendent, ascetic, rising above, spiritual model.
This is a basic HEP romantic theme in both theory and practice i.e. helping
people to experientially understand how their own self creation is (like) an authorial
creation of a work of art that can best be understood through characterization and story
line, and to help them move from the limitation of characterologic victimization in their
life story to authorial power and responsibility for characterization as self expression,
even as it all seems to be ‘happening’ to the character. By accepting the
characterological lack of control and yet still authentically enacting characterization,
character co-creatively joins with author as they mutually enact the story of a life. The
realization of this is a fundamental HEP goal.
Another significant romantic theme in depth psychology is contained in the focus
on suffering. Hillman’s archetypal psychology writings on pathologizing (Revisioning
Psychology) as “a fundament, a strand in all our being, woven into every complex”
express this romantic viewpoint. He echoes the existential romantic view of suffering as
a revelatory and transformative agent in suggesting that “pathologizing moves the myth
of the individual onward by first moving him out of the heroic ego”. He also defines
suffering as basic to individual evolution. “By beginning with the symptom ‘a thing that
is more foreign to the ego’, pathologizing turns the psyche on a new pivot: death
becomes the centre… as such pathologizing is a hermeneutic which leads events into
meaning”. Hillman’s statements that posit the psychological function of suffering as an
agent of the creation of meaning are fundamental to HEP.
Lacan’s work re desire, death, authenticity, and the return of the “real” in psychoanalysis
is especially relevant to the romantic theme in HEP. Richard Boothby in Death and
Desire – Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud shows that, for Lacan, the
ultimate human desire is for the return of the “real”. The real is a “lack or absence… the
impossible… the unspeakable force of trauma… the ineffable stirrings of organic need,
the unconsciousness of the body”. The real is that instinctual self that has been
 27

excluded in the creation of the ego. Given that, for Lacan, the imaginary world of the
ego is created by an act of exclusion of the real, for the adult subject the return of the
real presents itself as a threat of return of the “radically excluded, wholly unrecognized,
always still outstanding”. This threat of return of the real is fundamentally a threat of
destruction – the de-structuring of what has been built by the individual in the attempt to
contain and manage the vicissitudes of their life. This then is a death threat. Lacan
relates this to the Freudian notion of the death drive as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. Lacan says “Freud questioned life as to its meaning… to say that it has only
one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death”. Phenomenologically this is a
quintessentially Genesis statement that (the) desire (to know oneself as an individual)
leads to separation from the real (spiritual and instinctual) ground of being (God and
Nature) leading to the creation of (individual) human nature with its fundamental
relationship to alienation, suffering and awareness of death, classic HEP romantic
themes.
Lacan’s notion of the real that threatens to return is what, in mainstream
Christian culture, is called demonic. This is further delineated by Kristeva who says “I
become a subject capable of dealing with the objects only by virtue of having
constructed a domain of the abject” and “refuse and corpses show me what I
permanently thrust aside in order to live”. Lacan further suggests that the most basic
human desire contains aggressivity and is directed against the imaginary egoic unity of
the self and that this aggressivity is evolutionary, in that it promotes the return of the real
and thus a more whole, mature, self realized individual. This evolutionary, self directed
aggressive tendency however, presents itself in images of “castration, mutilation,
dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body”.
These are classic hell state, demonic images. This then places the demonic
disintegrative, de-structuring tendency in the service of individual evolution. Lacan
further suggests that “the efficacious action of analysis… is that the subject should
come to recognize the name of his desire”. As we have seen the most fundamental
desire to be named and enacted must lead to the death of what has been established.
Lacan specifically says “the function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation to
death,” a pervasive 19th and 20th century romantic theme in the arts, (as outlined, for
 28

example, in Binion’s Love Beyond Death) and fundamental to the HEP method of
evocation of projection as self affirmation (desire), engagement as conflict (eros/pathos)
and self reflections as recollection (thanatos).
Boothby puts it this way: “the agency of death is positively installed in the
subjective economy as a function of symbolic transformation”. Boothby’s account of
Heidegger says that “in inauthenticity the issue of Dasein’s relation to Being appears to
have been settled once and for all… authenticity, by contrast, involves the rediscovery
that there remains something questionable in Dasein’s being. Authenticity is thus a
mode of existence in which the issue of Dasein’s being, its potentiality for being other
than it has been, is somehow faced up to and acknowledged” through “being-toward-
death”. This move from inauthenticity to authenticity via awareness of death is
transformative and evolutionary in an existential and romantic sense. In that it means
becoming other than what one is, and coming to terms with one’s own otherness, it
pertains to the Oedipal riddle as outlined by Freud and Lacan i.e. Oedipus’ realization
that his destiny is bound up with a truth that, from the stand point of the ego, is an
abomination: “Am I made in the hour when I ceased to be?” We may thus suggest the
possibility that this agency that questions the egoic stance of conserving what is (a
questioning that from the egoic standpoint is experienced as a demonic death threat
and seen as misleading us into self denial, falseness and untruth) is precisely that which
leads us into a newer, more profound self expressive and self reflective truth. This can
be summed up in the Heideggerian position as delineated by Boothby “authenticity is
not so much a state of being as it is the submission to a process of becoming”. This is
reminiscent of the Frühromantick focus on a “poetry of yearning” rather than
accomplishment.
Finally, for Boothby, “the knotting of desire, death and language” is given in Lacan’s
discussion of Bernini’s St. Teresa, in which he sees “the coincidence of the most deeply
visceral and most utterly sublime.” According to Boothby “it points to a communion of
desire and language, the way in which the arrow of the signifier, what St. Teresa calls
‘the locutions of God’, penetrates and inflames the body’s most secret entrails… The
crucial, yet most mysterious point is that the motive of this being of significance lies in
jouissance, jouissance of the body. In this passage we confront the most enigmatic
 29

moments of Lacan’s thought: the insistence on a union beyond the imaginable of flesh
and word”. HEP enacts this coincidence of the visceral and the sublime in its romantic
focus on embodied aliveness as both primal and transpersonal.
Edward Hirsch shows in his book, The Demon and the Angel, how the deep, dark, fatal
challenge of the demonic fallen angel has inspired 19 th and 20th century Western poetry,
art and music, particularly in it’s romantic form. By implication we may extend this to
twentieth century depth psychology.
He shows that the romantic source of artistic inspiration has both demonic and
angelic qualities. He reveals dark, luminous, rhythmic, fiery, embodied space
consciousness as this source, which drives us out into the unknown country of our
emergent evolving self. This is a fallen angel of Eros, chaos and death who calls us into
self revelation as self expression, thus facilitating the spiritual embodiment of something
new and never before existing. According to Hirsch, deep living art – the art of living
passionately – is made when we open the door to the other side and yet are called back
to the world in a fatal fiery, erotic, spiritual dance. This is a theme enacted in the
transpersonal aspect of HEP, drawing deeply on the romantic tradition.
Hirsch provides a thematic historical survey of mostly romantic 19 th and 20th century
western poetry, art and music, focused through the activity of the figures of duende,
daimon, demon, angel. The work that is reviewed shows that duende, daimon, demon,
angel take us to the precipitous edge of the known world, the edge of the self, and
through a rigorous, disciplined “rational and systematic derangement of the senses”
(Rimbaud) enables us to return from the dark night mind emptiness of the void with
unique, inspirited, passionate poetic creations. “The duende’s arrival always means a
radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness with the
quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious
enthusiasm” (Lorca, Deep Song H 76). HEP seeks to evoke duende.
Duende is an Andalusian term for “a demonic anguish (that) suddenly charges and
electrifies a work of art in the looming presence of death” (Hirsh xii). It was made more
widely known by Federico Garcia Lorca through his essay, Play and Theory of the
Duende in the 1950’s. The duen de casa (“lord of the house”) is Poe’s “imp of the
perverse”, Baudelaire’s “good demon” and Yeats’ daimonic self. It is heard in Gypsy
 30

Flamenco music, Sephardic music, jazz, blues, true rock’n’roll and romantic poetry,
including the beats. It is especially conveyed through an experiential enactment in the
arts that “require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and
open their contours against an exact presence” (Lorca Deep Song quoted in H pg. 1)
The duende “delivers itself” (H 14). It is present tense, now, with a “dangerous
immediacy”. Martha Graham’s dance, happenings, and performance art enact this, as
does Artaud’s, Brooke’s and Grotowski’s theatre work. Duende is essentially romantic.
(H 14) Veronica Goodchild in Eros and Chaos connects this romantic embodiment
theme to divinity: “Alchemists, mystics and poets – those pilgrims of direct experience –
have always recognized that the link with the divine is through the transmutation of
intense affect in the body.” (47) This is the transpersonal theme in HEP primal
bodywork.
According to Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death, the romantic poets Rilke
and Valery also valued embodiment as the site of poetry – the source and the goal.
“Rilke believes… that ‘the qualities are to be taken away from God, the no longer
utterable, and returned to creation, to love and death’; so that the outcome of his poetry
is that ‘for Rilke, the body becomes a spiritual fact.’ Valery’s poetry ‘may be considered
as the Odyssey of Consciousness in search of its true body’; and ‘the intellectual pursuit
of Valery is to this end, that the body may be seen as what it virtually is, a magnificent
revelation and instrument of the soul.” (313) This is a HEP goal. Brown connects
Whitehead’s criticism of scientific abstraction with this embodiment theme and to the
romantic poets and philosophers. “…the resurrection of the body has been placed on
the agenda not only by psychoanalysis, mysticism, and poetry, but also by the
philosophical criticism of modern science.” In HEP the “resurrection of the body” is not
some mysterious post mortal fantasy but is enacted through recovery of aliveness in
those parts of ourselves we have deadened. “Whitehead’s criticism of scientific
abstraction is, in psychoanalytic terms, a criticism of sublimation. His protest against
‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ is a protest on behalf of the living body as a
whole: ‘But the living organ of experience is the living body as a whole’; and his protest
‘on behalf of value’ insists that the real structure of the human body, of human cognition,
and of the events cognized is both sensuous and erotic, ‘self-enjoyment.’ Whitehead
 31

himself recognized the affinity between himself and the romantic poets.” (314) Brown
specifies Blake, Novalis, Goethe, Hegel and Freud as romantic descendants of
Boehme, Paracelsus, alchemy, Christian gnosticism and Jewish Cabalism in the
tradition of poetic embodiment of spiritual fact. HEP is in this tradition.
But if duende is a deep source of vital, embodied, poetic inspiration, full of vigor
and life, it is also dark and fatal. The genius of duende rests on the awesome presence
of death and in awareness of the emptiness of form. Cesar Vallejo speaks from duende
in these lines. “Verily I say unto you that life is in the mirror and that you are the original,
death” (Trilce 1999 H 95). Hillman says “the goal of death is always now.” (Welman
127) This romantic awareness of death in life and life in death makes duende a dark,
dangerous, frightening and yet exciting, enlivening intensity that manifests and enacts
an essence of creativity. The essence of creativity that is given in Genesis, where the
creation of the self aware human is attendant upon Eros and generates awareness of
suffering and death. Lorca connects duende and death in his Gypsy Ballads “ It is a
longing without object, a keen love for nothing, with the certainty that death … is
breathing beyond the door.” (Deep Song 112 H 13) In the HEP primal experience of the
existential crisis that ultimately ensues in any embodied experiential depth tradition, this
romantic awareness of death is visceral and experiential and gives rise to a new vitality,
vigour and deep sense of self renewal. Walter Otto in Dionysus: Myth and Cult says “all
intoxication arises from the depths of life which have become fathomless because of
death... From these depths comes music – Dionysian music – which transforms the
world in which life has become a habit and a certainty and death a threatening evil” (140
H 196)
Mark Welman in “Thanatos and Existence – towards a Jungian phenomenology
of the death instinct,” from Pathways into the Jungian World, speaks of “poetic
thanatology” which “regards death as a fundamental dimension of Being and a vital
correlate of the attempt to establish existence as meaningful” (124). He quotes Jung
“from the perspective of the Self, death appears as a joyful event… a mysterium
conniunctionis (through which) the soul… achieves wholeness.” (127) “Death as a
transcendent reality is therefore a metaphor for a pivotal shift in ones mode of
experiencing things from iconoclastic literalism to imaginative vision” (131) in which,
 32

according to Jung, “the old ways of seeing things is abandoned and the world acquires
a new significance.” “It is not that something different is seen but that one sees
differently.” This new way of seeing could best be called poetic, specifically in the
romantic sense: “death offers a poetic space within which rigid assumptions and
hypostatized experience may be deliteralized and reviewed in an imaginative or
symbolic light.” (132) Welman quotes Avens: “we can get to the specifically and
ontologically human, the ‘no-thing’ at the centre of our being, only by moving through
the poetic mode and by using poetic tools. Only the poet in us is attuned to our essential
‘no-thing’ness.” (136) HEP is a poetic tradition in this sense.
Death, or the awareness of death, or even more specifically the experience of
death in life, becomes a vital means of accessing the romantic poetic core of being. And
a necessary experience as we enter Heidegger’s “shrine of nothing” (132) from which
takes place “an awakening of symbolic life and a deepening of personal identity and of
one’s experience of the world.” (137) Jung argued that the meaning of life “never
becomes more urgent or agonizing” than in the face of death, and acceptance of death
as the foundation upon which life rests is required for a full participation in life, “for not
wanting to die and not wanting to live are synonymous.” (126) This is duende as
incorporated into HEP.
Brown (Life Against Death) makes a strong case for death (that which dissolves
boundaries) as the essence of dreaming, poetry and mysticism through his account of
the basically dialectic nature of Freud’s work. Death as the ultimate affirmation,
dialectically constellating through Eros as the proximal affirmation, is contained in the
idea that in the deep psyche, in the dream, in the poem, everything can mean
something else. This can mean that. This opening of literalness to symbolic otherness is
a romantic death experience that makes possible the erotic rebinding of that which has
been rent asunder by the “hardness of life” (Rilke). “The key to the nature of dialectical
thinking may lie in psychoanalysis, more specifically in Freud’s psychoanalysis of
negation. There is first the theorem that there is nothing in the id which can be
compared to negation, and that the law of contradiction does not hold in the id. Similarly,
the dream does not seem to recognize the word ‘no’. Instead of the law of contradiction
we find the unity of opposites: ‘Dreams show a special tendency to reduce two
 33

opposites to a unity’; ‘Anything in a dream may mean its opposite.’ We must therefore
entertain the hypothesis that there is an important connection between being ‘dialectical’
and dreaming, just as there is between dreaming and poetry or mysticism.” (320) This
connection is both erotic and fatal and is fundamental to the HEP incorporation of the
romantic theme from the psychoanalytic tradition.
In Lorca’s work we see a unification of Eros and Thanatos such that we may
conclude that life rests in death and death is vitally present in life, not just the outcome
of life. Lorca suggests St. Theresa as exemplifying this conniunctio of Eros and
Thanatos in duende. “She was one of the few creatures whose duende… pierced her
with a dart and wanted to kill her for having stolen his deepest secret, the subtle bridges
that unite the five senses with the raw wound, that living cloud, that stormy ocean of
Love freed from Time”. This is reminiscent of Lacan’s interpretation of Bernini’s St.
Theresa: “she’s coming, there’s no doubt about it”, having been penetrated in “the
body’s most secret entrails” by what she calls “the locutions of God”. (Boothby) This
romantic elaboration of duende calls for the passionate participation of duende in the
travails of the world, not only as the source of art but, more profoundly, as the ultimate
source of aliveness as distinct from the deadness of iconoclastic literal linearity, blind
rational conformity and fascistic preservation of the status quo. This is a significant
romantic HEP theme. “The duende, then, is a power, not a work; it is a struggle, not a
thought… ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the
soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of
blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.” (43 Play & Theory)
Dramatic gestalt enactments in HEP, in their deepest existential sense, evoke duende.
Goodchild (Eros and Chaos) speaks of “a move from an order/power-based
consciousness to a chaos/love-based awareness [that] can also be seen as a move
from a hierarchically ordered universe that excludes its unwanted shadows, to a soul-
making cosmos based on mutual regard and participation … C.G. Jung speaks of an
evolving consciousness that can endure opposites, and face its shadows, as the
achievement of the Holy Spirit, meaning a ‘restitution of the original oneness of the
unconscious on the level of consciousness’ ”. (4) This is the evolutionary dialectic
movement outlined in the Axiom of Maria, a 4th century alchemical formulation of
 34

emanation (splitting) and return to origin (unity) through engagement of polarized

opposites. The origin that is returned to however, while it retains its original unity, is not
the same as it was before. It is an evolved unity, a one that has become four, via duality
(two i.e. alienated polarities) becoming dialectic (three i.e. relational polarities). This is a
key theme of the romantic tradition in HEP and an experiential focus of Gestalt dramatic
enactments in their deepest form in HEP. In this sense it is not the mythology of
Genesis as the creation of the human race but the mythology of Genesis as the creation
of individual humanness in each person.
Goodchild makes a strong case for the linking of Eros and Chaos as two cosmic
forces which enact unity within diversity. You can’t have one without the other. Eros and
Chaos each comes from and leads into the other. Each accompanies the other. Each
has a cosmogonic function. Eros binds together that which has been rent asunder
restoring unity. Chaos is the split that rents asunder that which must evolve toward new
forms and functions of the original unity. Chaos is the order hidden in disorder, a
metalevel which structures seemingly discrete, conflictual, disparate elements into a
coherent functioning whole through the strange attraction of a subtle, dynamical,
systemic binding. This subtle chaotic binding is erotic. The bondage of love is chaotic.
The binding of chaos is erotic. And so it goes. Eros. Chaos. Duende. HEP.
Goodchild, in her account of the Greek mythology of Eros, speaks of the chaotic
aspect. She highlights the instinctual, passionate, ecstatic, Dionysian creative (i.e.
romantic) nature of this dark, fatal, underworld energy. “In his Orphic origins, Eros is the
creator god who not only sets the rest of the universe in motion, but also as Eros
Phanes (“light-bringer”) has links to the creation of consciousness as revelation – an
illuminated visionary consciousness (rather than the logos of interpretation) – and to the
instinctual realms in his theriomorphic forms that also connect him with Dionysus, God
of wine, ecstatic experience, and women. So Eros in this guise holds the tension of
sexual, instinctual love, and the spiritual forms of love…. In Hesiod’s Theogony (where
he first appears in ancient Greece), Eros is, after Chaos and Gaea (Earth), one of the
three primordial divinities, whose activities and energy is universal and extends to all
being. Eros here is an underlying force of creation. In this myth he is also brother to
Night and Erebus, and thus is linked with the unconscious, with death, with journeys to
 35

the underworld and, inevitably, with love’s shadows.” (11) The theriomorphic
Eros/Dionysus, god of intoxication and sexual instinctual love is the brother of Night,
connected to death and journeys into the underworld where we recover the lost treasure
of our split-off deadened parts of self. Eros Phanes as the bringer of the light of human
consciousness could then be said to be the mythic creator of the world of human
consciousness in an individual, and the agent of the homo dei conniunctio between
creator and creature in an individual. As such, Eros Phanes is an archetype of self
creation, the experience of which is a deep long term goal of the archetypal and
existential theme of romantic irony in HEP.
Brown (Life Against Death) speaks further of the dialectic play of Eros and
Thanatos. He relates Freud’s work to that of Jacob Boehme. “Boehme, like Freud,
understands death not as a mere nothing but as a positive force, either in dialectical
conflict with life (in fallen man), or dialectically unified with life (in God’s perfection).”
(310) He draws on Christian theology and eschatology to suggest that it is precisely
through acceptance of the ever present reality of death that an “eternal body” is attained
i.e. a body that is alive in the fullness of the here and now moment, not preoccupied
with a refusal of history or guarding against a threatening future. “The death instinct is
reconciled with the life instinct only in a life which is not repressed, which leaves no
‘unlived lines’ in the human body, the death instinct then being affirmed in a body which
is willing to die.”
The duende moves through this embodied passion play of Eros and Thanatos as
the romantic passion of yearning, of lost love, of burning desire, of a compulsion to be,
to do, to have, to become, to enact. This Shakespearian and romantic theme burns
through the abstract expressionist modernist action painters who wish to viscerally lose
themselves in their work so that they become an embodiment, an instance of action.
Spontaneous fiery presence shaking the body and darkly burning up the soul. “But
there are neither maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he
burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the
sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles.” (45 Deep Song) – and egos.
This combination of passion and spontaneous action was particularly enacted in
Pollock. “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a
 36

sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about
making changes, destroying the image, etc. because the painting has a life of its own. I
try to let it come through…” (H 173). This is the emergent romantic phenomenological
theme in HEP through which a new evolved sense of self is formed. Duende brings forth
this creative Dionysian/Pentecostal intensity from within, the new thing that grins at us
horrendously from the deep darkness of our unmet desire, our unmet need, our
passionate yearning to go beyond the known, to become something that we are not yet,
to leave the garden and go forth into the wild, dangerous and painful wilderness, in
search of what we are to become. This is the romantic evolutionary theme in HEP.
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Spiritual Counselling and Psychotherapy

There are a number of different spiritual methods/practices employed in a
number of different spiritual traditions that currently are employed also in the field of
psychotherapy. Mindfulness meditation (from Buddhism), guided visualization (from the
Sufi, Wicca and Kabalistic traditions -- among others), the promoting of personal growth
and the full realization of potential (central to the Buddhist and Gnostic traditions --
among others), the activation and realization of full authentic human self identity (central
to the apophatic mystical tradition in its Neoplatonic, Sufi and union mysticism forms)
are all examples of spiritual practices that are utilized, in one way or another, in
psychotherapy. Mindfulness meditation has been utilized by CBT, for example, in the
treatment of depression and anxiety. Guided visualization is part of transpersonal and
Jungian psychotherapy. The focus on growth and self-realization of potential is a
fundamental part of all psychodynamic psychotherapy. The specific focus on attaining
full human authenticity is a core part of humanistic/existential psychotherapy and basic
to the central project of Jungian psychotherapy, that of individuation.

In addition, the kind of experiences facilitated in some spiritual traditions overlap

with some psychotherapy experiences. The intense emotional activation of the
Pentecostal tradition, the emotional mysticism of the Beloved tradition (as delineated,
for example, in the writings of Theresa of Avilla and John of the Cross), the union
mysticism of the Beguines (such as Hadjewich of Antwerp and Marguerite of Porete, as
given in Michael Sells’ book, Mystical Languages of Unsaying) are examples of spiritual
experiences that overlap with experiential, body oriented psychotherapies such as
primal and core energetics. In regard to the Pentecostal religion’s emotional basis,
theologian Harvey Cox in his book Fire From Heaven says “the imagery, mood, and
tempo of a (Pentecostal) religious service are not just add-ons. They are not
superfluous. Human beings are physical as well as mental creatures, and therefore
these more tactile elements are part of the substance of the worship. And since life
itself is so full of conflict and craving, of wild hopes and dashed expectations, any
religion that does not resonate with the full range of these feelings, and provide ways of
wrestling with them is not worth much” (p.11). Resonating with feelings and providing
 38

ways of dealing with them is basic to and definitive of all forms of psychotherapy. He
also says that “the (Pentecostal) religious setting provides a reassuring environment
where we can safely become as little children …” (p.88), referencing the glossolalia
experiences in the Pentecostal tradition to what psychologists Ann and Barry Ulanov
call “primary speech” in their eponymous book, which is “preverbal expression of
pressing needs, demanding urges, and tumultuous emotions that is so evident in
infants” (p.88). Regressing to ‘become as little children’ and expressing infant emotions
and needs are very specific psychotherapy phenomena, central to any
psychodynamically based experiential tradition, such as primal therapy or bioenergetics,
but also to psychoanalysis. Grof’s holotropic breath work also overlaps with depth
experiential therapies such as primal therapy, bioenergetics and core energetics. It is a
transpersonal modality that is not psychotherapy and has an
archetypal/spiritual/cosmological focus. The apophatic mystical tradition’s
‘disappearance’ phenomena match those of the existential crisis experience in
existential/transpersonal psychotherapy (Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael
Sells)

In terms of traditions, transpersonal psychotherapy is perhaps the most complex

in its overlap with spiritual traditions, being a specifically spiritually based and spiritually
oriented model. Accredited graduate programs in transpersonal psychology (at places
such as the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Buddhist university Naropa and
the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) offer courses in Buddhism, the Neoplatonic
tradition, Christian mysticism and such, as part of MA and PhD degrees in transpersonal
psychology. The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, established in 1976, is the
original fully accredited transpersonal graduate institution. It has offered specific
courses in spiritual counselling as part of its program in transpersonal psychology. In his
book Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, Jorge Ferrer says of
transpersonal psychology that it recognizes spirituality, “not only as an important focus
of psychological theory and research, but also as an essential foundation of
psychological health and healing” (p.viii). He goes on to specify various spiritual
traditions that have become subjects of study in transpersonal psychology – ‘indigenous
 39

and shamanic, esoteric and gnostic, Romantic and Neo-Romantic, … Wiccan and
Goddess spirituality, Buddhism, nature mysticism, Christian and Jewish and Islamic
mysticism, anthroposophy, American Transcendentalism, deep ecology, … evolutionary
cosmology, Whiteheadian process theology, Bhomian physics and many others” (p.xii).
The extensive and complex overlap between psychology and spirituality is here
delineated by a leading theorist in the field of transpersonal psychology – Ferrer
teaches at the California Institute of Integral studies, a founding institution in the field.

Significant elements of Jungian psychotherapy overlap with mystical and spiritual

traditions. Jung is typically taught in religion departments in universities, rarely in
psychology departments. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy is a central text of Jungian
psychotherapy. Alchemy, since the 17th©, is a spiritual tradition. The ‘as above so
below’, and the ‘inner and outer are one’ aphorisms of the alchemical tradition are a
spiritual statement of the cosmogonic power of the human psyche that is also
configured in the Sufi tradition’s understanding of the imaginal world as a separate, yet
interpenetrating, dream like reality within which exists counterparts to the everyday
empirical world and the psychological structure of the individual. Working with the
personified imaginal world in the form of figures that one engages in dialogue with, as if
they were empirically real and autonomous yet corresponding to emerging aspects of
the individual’s psyche, is a Sufi, Kabbalistic and esoteric Christian technique that is
also utilized in Jungian, archetypal and transpersonal psychology. Jungian psychology
also extensively references Christian spirituality, reconfiguring it partly, but not wholly, as
a psychology. Von Franz, in her Dreams of Death, also draws on ancient Egyptian
spirituality in her understanding of the psychology of death. Jungians in general make
extensive reference to the spiritual themes in Greek and Mediterranean mythology,
often drawing on Joseph Campbell’s reading of this. The Hillman/archetypal psychology
tripartite psychological structure (mind-soul-body) is based in a mystical tripartite
cosmology, the spirit-mundis imaginalis-matter cosmological structure of Plotinus’ 2nd©
Neoplatonism, Ficinos’ Renaissance Hermeticism and Corbin’s 20 th © Islamic
esotericism from Persian and Arabic Sufi sources. In “Imagination in Mysticism and
Esotericism: Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius of Loyola, and Alchemy” (published in Studies in
 40

Spirituality, No 6, 1996, 106-130), Karen-Claire Voss says of Ficino, for example, that
he “was not only attempting to provide a manual for physical and psychological health;
more importantly, he hoped to provide a formula for placing his readers in the right
relation to the cosmos, and to the divine”. Far from being anachronistic, Ficino is
considered a founding figure in 20th© archetypal psychology, and, by James Hillman, to
be “one of the most neglected figures in the movement of Western ideas.”

The fana (disappearance experience) of divine/human union in the Sufi tradition

(Mystical Languages of Unsaying, M. Sells) is the spiritual equivalent of the
relativization of the ego in favour of the Self in Jungian and archetypal psychology, and
central to the existential/phenomenological tradition’s achievement of full authentic
being-in-the-world through being-towards-death. James Bugental suggests that, in
existential-humanist psychotherapy, of which Bugental is a founding figure, people have
experiences “that transcend the ordinary life boundaries. These transpersonal openings
may include such subjective phenomena as: discovery of greater depth, richness, and
meaningfulness of the stream of subjective awareness; a changed experience of time,
causality, or relationship; synesthesia or other alterations in perception; conjunction in
subjectivity (e.g., telepathy, markedly increased empathy); recognition of the ultimate
unity of all being; discovery of the healing powers of consciousness; and the recognition
of death as an event, rather than ending.” (The Psychotherapy Handbook, ed. Richie
Herink, p. 188) These are also experiences facilitated and attained in spiritual practices
such as yoga, pranayama, holotropic breathwork, and various forms of experiential
mysticism, particularly of the apophatic type. Heidegger’s philosophy, seminal to
existential psychotherapy, has a significant spiritual dimension. His focus on recovery
of an authentic sense of self (the Being of beings) is the focus of all experiential
mysticism. His language has a mystical style. His method of caring-for-things-as-they-
are (Sorge) is the compassionate theme in Buddhism, the charity theme in Christianity.
His notion of authenticity as defined by the incompleteness of always becoming and
never arriving and of being-toward-death, are key themes in phenomenological
Buddhism, where, in the practice of Dzogchen, one focuses simply of the suchness of
the breath ceaselessly becoming and passing, on an image of death or on a simple
 41

banality of everyday life, and, with time and the proper facilitation, this is taken as being
sufficient to bring enlightenment, the Buddhist equivalent of authenticity. This Dzogchen
phenomenological focus on the immediacy of the ‘now’ is also a key theme in Gestalt.
Buddhism is a discipline that has clear psychological implications and some specific
psychological content in its theory and practice. Lama Anagarika Govinda, in his
comprehensive account of Vajrayana Buddhism, Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism,
states this explicitly – “The starting point of the Buddhist yoga is neither of cosmological
nor of theological-metaphysical character, but psychological in the deepest sense.” (p.
179).
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HEP Aphorisms
1. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. All you need is love. And a little faith.

2. What is your experience? What does it mean to you? How is it to be enacted in

the world in the service of life?

3. It’s not the drop that slips into the ocean. It’s the ocean that slips into the drop.
Ever the fire burns, ever composed of self and the heart is the altar.

4. Remember that what you are looking for is looking for you. Because what you
are looking for is what is looking.

5. You have the life you want by wanting the life you have

6. It’s not about waking up in the dream, it’s about dreaming your waking life.

7. The dream isn’t in us we are in the dream.

8. When you can’t get over it you gotta get into it.

9. Let yourself be moved

10. To reach your goal, keep your eye on the horizon

To be taken where you need to go, look at where you stand.

11. Who am I that my life should occur to me in this way?

What is my life asking of me?
.

12. Passionate participation in your life will bring you to your divinity.

13. Take yourself as you find yourself but don’t leave yourself as you find yourself.
43