I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
So many garish lamps in the dying brain’s lamp-show,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on the essence, concentrate on the Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams towards you from all things,
All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
but the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.
—Maulana Jalaludin Rumi
The ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become.
—Sri Aurobindo
INTRODUCTION
Mental health is soul health. It is about connection, community, creativity, and meaning, and yes, it is about spirituality, love, care, and safety. Despite capitalist-minded attempts, these can never become commodities. The soul cannot be bought and sold, although some may argue otherwise, usually the same ones running our world.
After nine months of intense study, I completed a postgraduate diploma in Islamic Psychology at Cambridge, UK, in the summer of 2024. When I mention these two words, Islamic Psychology (I.P.), side by side, they sometimes provoke confusion: How could religion or spirituality mingle with psychology?
Yet the question itself reveals something about modern psychology and the way it has gradually distanced itself from metaphysics, spirituality, and even the language of the soul.
Islamic Psychology emerges from a very different intellectual and spiritual landscape. Like other contemplative and religious traditions, it takes the inner life of the human being seriously: our impulses, wounds, desires, contradictions, capacities for transformation, and relationship to the Divine. Within the Islamic tradition, the human being cannot be adequately understood through the mind or psyche alone, but through an integrated understanding of the nafs, heart, Spirit, body, intellect, and their relationship to God.
The human being is therefore not a static psychological object but a being continually undergoing refinement, remembrance, struggle, and transformation.
Institutional religion, of course, has also left deep wounds in the collective psyche. Religious structures can become constrictive, divisive, abusive, and spiritually deadening. But the failures of religious institutions do not erase the profound psychological, philosophical, and contemplative knowledge preserved within religious traditions.
Mainstream psychology, particularly within its cognitive and behavioural branches, can still recoil at words such as soul or Spirit. As I discussed in a previous piece on psychosis and spiritual awakening, The Nature of Madness, the word psyche itself derives from the Greek psykhē (ψυχή), a term historically associated with “soul,” “spirit,” and “mind.” Over time, psychology increasingly came to refer to the study of the mind and behaviour, while questions once belonging to philosophy, religion, and metaphysics were pushed toward the margins.
This is not an argument for abandoning medicine, psychiatry, diagnosis, or evidence-based care. It is an argument for decentering them. No single field of knowledge should have a monopoly on people’s destinies, least of all psychiatry.
Suffice it to say that recent research has seriously challenged one of modern psychiatry’s most familiar explanations for depression: the “chemical imbalance” theory. A major systematic umbrella review published in Molecular Psychiatry found no consistent evidence that depression is caused by lowered serotonin levels or activity in the brain.
This does not mean that antidepressants never help, nor that psychiatric medication has no place in treatment. It does, however, complicate the longstanding narrative that such medications correct an underlying chemical deficiency and raises important questions about how confidently biological explanations of human suffering have sometimes been presented.
The medical model has offered indispensable forms of treatment and understanding, particularly in states of severe psychological distress. But no single framework can contain the full complexity of human suffering. Decentering modern psychology allows other psychological, philosophical, spiritual, and non-Western traditions to enter the conversation as equals, rather than as comparative detours from a presumed Western norm.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) can be useful as a system of classification and communication. Problems arise, however, when diagnosis moves from describing an experience to defining the person who is experiencing it. Within a broader biomedical culture, complex human suffering can easily become reduced to symptoms, disorders, and treatment protocols.
Diagnosis and trauma becoming central to one’s identity is therefore worth examining.
I include myself in this reflection. I received different mental health diagnoses, and while they informed my journey and at times helped make sense of what I was experiencing, I refuse to let them define me. Healing, I have learned, involves an ongoing movement toward self-understanding and acceptance while recognizing that diagnosis may be part of our story without becoming the entirety of who we are.
We are far more interesting than our clinical labels.
ISLAMIC PSYCHOLOGY & TRANSPERSONAL THERAPY
Islamic Psychology can benefit anyone, not just Muslims, because, after all, it offers a map of the human soul, one drawn according to different cartographical conventions.
Like other spiritual psychologies, Islamic Psychology offers ways of exploring suffering, meaning, character, relationship, and transformation. It draws from revelation, hadith, and a deeply rooted intellectual tradition encompassing Islamic philosophy, theology, medicine, ethics, and Sufism.
I write more about this intellectual history in Beyond the Self in Islamic Philosophy. Islamic philosophy did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Muslim thinkers engaged extensively with Greek philosophy and medicine, while the broader intellectual world of Muslim civilization also encountered Persian, Indian, and other bodies of knowledge. These ideas were translated, debated, challenged, transformed, and situated within an Islamic metaphysical and ethical worldview.
Islamic Psychology does not need to function as a form of proselytization in the therapy room. Its insights into the human being can inform therapeutic work without requiring the client to adopt Islamic language or belief. Mentors in the field have advised practitioners to be thoughtful about when, or whether, the term “Islamic Psychology” itself is useful with clients. The task is not to impose a worldview but to draw creatively and ethically from a rich psychology of the human being while helping people navigate complex modern predicaments.
Transpersonal psychotherapy, meanwhile, emerged from transpersonal psychology in the late 1960s in the United States and is often described as psychology’s “fourth force,” following psychoanalysis, behaviourism, and humanistic psychology. Figures such as Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich sought to expand psychology beyond pathology and ordinary ego functioning to include questions of consciousness, transcendence, mystical experience, and human potential—areas that had historically belonged largely to philosophy, religion, and contemplative traditions.
Both transpersonal psychology and Islamic Psychology move beyond an exclusively symptom-focused understanding of psychological suffering. Each, in very different ways, makes room for the client’s broader existential and spiritual life and asks questions that may not fit easily within conventional therapeutic frameworks.
This does not make approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) useless. CBT can be enormously helpful. But in my own consultation calls, I have repeatedly heard people describe reaching a point where cognitive reframing no longer touched the depth of what they were experiencing. More than once, clients have said some version of the same thing: “It worked in the beginning, but then I started to feel gaslit by my therapist.”
Sometimes a person does not simply need to think differently about their suffering. They need a framework spacious enough to ask what the suffering means, what it is asking of them, and how it belongs within the larger movement of their life.
CRITIQUE OF WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY
Modern psychology emerged largely within Western intellectual traditions, including the enduring influence of Cartesian dualism, with its separation of mind and body. The rise of scientism, an over-reliance on what can be quantified as “evidence-based,” and the dominance of psychopharmacology have all faced significant criticism.
In his book The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, British group analyst Farhad Dalal critiques the managerial and scientific claims surrounding CBT, particularly the tendency to reduce complex human suffering to measurable outcomes and standardized interventions. His critique raises broader questions about what gets counted as evidence, what gets excluded, and what may be lost when efficiency and quantification begin to determine how psychological care is delivered.
Other critical psychologists, including Ian Parker, have similarly questioned forms of psychology that isolate distress from the cultural, political, relational, and socioeconomic worlds in which people actually live.
Concerned with Western psychology and its blind spots, Dr. Malik Badri, often called the “father of modern Islamic psychology,” published The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists in 1979. His work challenged Muslim psychologists to examine the assumptions they had inherited through Western psychological models rather than adopting them uncritically. Though his work has also been critiqued, it was groundbreaking and remains deeply influential in contemporary Islamic Psychology.
Badri’s critique was not simply that Western psychology was “Western.” The deeper question was what happens when one particular understanding of the human being becomes universalized and then exported as though it were culturally and metaphysically neutral.
Decentering Western psychology allows the indigeneity of Islamic Psychology and other non-Western psychologies to emerge in their own complexity. Islamic Psychology is rooted in the cultural, spiritual, ethical, and intellectual worlds of Muslim civilization. It is not merely Western psychology translated into Islamic terminology, nor an adaptation of an already complete psychological system.
Rather, it emerges from centuries of reflection on the human being through the Qur’an, Hadith, philosophy, medicine, theology, ethics, and Sufism.
To decenter Western psychology, then, is not to discard it. It is to remove its presumed position as the universal measure against which every other understanding of the human being must be judged.
FOUNDATIONS OF TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY
In 1968, Anthony Sutich published “Transpersonal Psychology: An Emerging Force”, helping to formally articulate a field that had been emerging through the work of Abraham Maslow and others within humanistic psychology. Maslow’s growing interest in peak and religious experiences increasingly moved his work beyond self-actualization toward questions of transcendence, higher human potential, and experiences that seemed to exceed the boundaries of the ordinary ego.
In fact, toward the end of his life, Maslow increasingly moved beyond self-actualization toward the concept of self-transcendence. Yet mainstream presentations of Maslow’s hierarchy still commonly stop at self-actualization, leaving this later development of his thought largely out of the picture.
Over the years, transpersonal psychology has resisted a single definition. Nonetheless, key figures in the field have identified several recurring themes, including beyond-ego psychology, integrative or holistic psychology, and the psychology of transformation.
“Beyond ego” does not necessarily mean the destruction or rejection of the ego. Rather, it refers to experiences and dimensions of consciousness that exceed our ordinary sense of being a separate, bounded self. The field has therefore taken seriously experiences that mainstream psychology has often struggled to accommodate, including mystical and unitive states, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, psi phenomena, and other non-ordinary states of consciousness.
An integrative approach similarly resists reducing the human being to cognition or individual psychological functioning alone. It pays attention to the body, relationships, culture, ecology, social context, meaning, and the larger existential questions that accompany human life. Transformation, within this framework, is not simply about reducing symptoms but about what a person may become through their encounter with suffering, consciousness, relationship, and meaning.
Unlike psychotherapies primarily concerned with resolving psychological conflict or managing symptoms, transpersonal psychotherapy also makes room for the possibility that some conflicts are multilayered, existential, and even transformative.
It seeks to engage dimensions of experience beyond ordinary ego functioning and may draw from approaches such as dreamwork, mindfulness, somatic practices, breathwork, and spiritual or contemplative practices.
This is part of what makes transpersonal psychology relevant to the present discussion. It reopened questions that modern psychology had increasingly relegated to religion, philosophy, and mysticism: What is consciousness? What lies beyond the individual ego? What gives suffering meaning? What constitutes transformation? And can a psychology of the human being remain complete if it excludes the possibility of transcendence?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
Modern psychology emerged during a period in which the study of the human being was increasingly being separated from philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Sigmund Freud, one of the central figures in the development of psychoanalysis, sought to establish a psychology that could operate within the scientific assumptions of his time, even while working with something inherently difficult to quantify: the unconscious.
Freud was deeply skeptical of religion and resisted explanations he regarded as mystical or metaphysical. Yet psychoanalysis itself ventured into hidden dimensions of human experience—dreams, symbols, repression, desire, fantasy, and unconscious motivation—that could not simply be observed from the outside.
Carl Jung eventually departed from Freud’s framework and developed analytical psychology, expanding the psychological imagination through archetypes, mythology, religion, dreams, and what he called the collective unconscious. Unlike Freud, Jung regarded religious and spiritual experience as psychologically significant and believed that questions of meaning and the sacred could not simply be dismissed as remnants of primitive thinking.
Other intellectual movements were also challenging increasingly reductionist accounts of the human being. Phenomenology turned attention toward lived experience and consciousness as they are actually encountered rather than reducing experience entirely to externally measurable phenomena. Gestalt psychology emphasized that human perception cannot always be understood by breaking experience into isolated components; the whole possesses qualities that cannot be explained merely through its parts. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy likewise attempted to develop a more explicitly spiritual understanding of human development, education, and consciousness.
These movements differed considerably from one another, yet each resisted, in its own way, reducing the human being to a purely mechanical or behavioural organism.
Still, an important boundary remained. Psychology could investigate religious experience, symbolism, altered states, meaning, archetypes, and even transcendence while remaining hesitant to make metaphysical claims about what those experiences ultimately are.
Perhaps this is one of the important lines between modern psychology and religious or contemplative traditions.
Psychology may ask what an experience of God does within the psyche.
A religious tradition may also ask whether God is real.
THE DEATH OF GOD
When Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead,” he was not simply celebrating atheism or the disappearance of religious institutions. He was diagnosing a profound cultural rupture. The metaphysical and religious frameworks that had long grounded meaning, morality, and value in European life were losing their authority, and Nietzsche understood that their collapse would leave humanity facing the problem of nihilism.
After the “death of God,” humanity would have to confront the question of where meaning and value come from when the old metaphysical foundations no longer hold.
This question remains deeply relevant to psychology. When transcendence disappears from our understanding of the human being, meaning itself can become increasingly privatized: something the individual must manufacture, optimize, or construct alone.
Transpersonal psychology attempts, in part, to reopen this horizon. But transpersonal work eventually confronts us with something the modern psyche often resists: surrender.
I struggle with this still. Every time I think I have surrendered, another layer appears.
The modern psyche greatly resists surrender, and this resistance may be one of the sources of our suffering.
I see this in myself when forgetfulness seeps in, and I see it around me: the survival, fear, and grasping that often appear as anxiety. Religious or spiritual identification does not make anyone immune. Sometimes those who identify strongly with faith may find it particularly difficult to admit that they are anxious, uncertain, or that their sense of faith has temporarily weakened.
The Arabic word for human being, insān (إنسان), has traditionally been associated with nisyān, forgetfulness. We forget, and then we remember. Each return deepens the possibility of remembrance, or dhikr, while heedlessness recedes.
Perhaps this movement between forgetfulness and remembrance is part of what it means to be human.
When trauma, fear, or prolonged survival disconnect us from our emotions, our bodies, and the deeper dimensions of the self, the quality of consciousness changes. Life can become narrower and less alive. What was once experienced as meaningful becomes distant, and the Source of sustenance becomes increasingly obscured.
GOD NEVER DIED
Some of the intellectual roots of transpersonal psychology can be traced to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902. James took religious and mystical experiences seriously as dimensions of human experience worthy of psychological inquiry. Rather than immediately dismissing them as pathology or superstition, he examined what these experiences meant to the people who underwent them and how they transformed their lives.
This was a significant move. Psychology could investigate religious experience without first having to determine whether its metaphysical claims were objectively true.
Decades later, Stanislav Grof’s research into psychedelic and non-ordinary states of consciousness pushed these questions further. After years of clinical research with psychedelics, Grof and his wife, Christina, developed Holotropic Breathwork in the 1970s as a way of accessing non-ordinary states without psychedelic substances. Grof’s work challenged models of the psyche that treated ordinary waking consciousness as the outer limit of legitimate psychological experience. I will address psychedelic-assisted therapy separately.
Ken Wilber later developed an ambitious mapping of the spectrum of consciousness, attempting to integrate psychology, spirituality, philosophy, contemplative traditions, and theories of human development into a comprehensive framework.
Something is mesmerizing about Wilber’s work: the relentless classification and reclassification of complex ideas into stages, levels, states, lines, and structures. It is enormously alluring to the modern mind because it appears to make an immense and chaotic field of human experience intelligible.
But this desire for a universal map also became one of the major points of contention within transpersonal psychology.
Jorge Ferrer, particularly in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, challenged approaches that organize spiritual traditions and experiences according to predetermined universal hierarchies. His participatory approach emphasizes spiritual knowing as relational, embodied, pluralistic, and enacted through participation rather than merely discovered as a pre-existing hierarchy of consciousness.
The debate between Ferrer’s participatory approach and Wilber’s hierarchical framework points toward a much larger question:
Can the mysteries of human consciousness be mapped without reducing them to the map?
Wilber’s approach tries to preserve depth and developmental distinction, resisting what he describes as a kind of spiritual “flatland” in which every experience or worldview becomes equivalent. Ferrer, conversely, warns that universal hierarchies can privilege particular traditions, states, or interpretations as inherently “higher” while marginalizing other ways of encountering the sacred.
Both concerns matter.
Without discernment, pluralism can collapse into relativism. But without humility, developmental maps can quietly become metaphysical empires.
This tension is particularly important for transpersonal psychology because the field inhabits an unusual borderland. It wants to take mystical experience, transformation, transcendence, and expanded states of consciousness seriously while still participating in psychological and scientific discourse.
Perhaps the task is not to force one side to defeat the other.
Transpersonal psychology can remain in dialogue with neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy, and other empirical disciplines without reducing spiritual experience to neurological mechanisms. Likewise, taking transcendence seriously does not require abandoning critical thought or empirical inquiry.
The deeper question is whether psychology can study consciousness without assuming in advance that consciousness is nothing more than the brain, and whether it can encounter the sacred without immediately reducing the sacred to a psychological phenomenon.
The “death of God,” after all, was never the death of God.
It was the crisis of a particular human projection onto God.
I needed this this morning. I have been in a state of anxious forgetfulness related to "survival" concerns. Thanks Thal!