Studying Psychology ---> A Way To Enlightenment?

[Cesar Alba]

I'm in my first months of General Psychology at the university. I decided this career because I think that it will help me on my enlightenment journey but just a few weeks ago I talked to my Spritual teacher and he told me that it won't help at all, because what I'm seeking is in my inside and I can not find it in any conceptualized form. What do you guys think?

Im in a point of my life that I feel stuck in this self imposed personality you know?

Its like the fucking egg and the chicken, I don't know what the fuck came first. If they said I'm complicated, dramatic, introspective and good person. Or if it's like I really was complicated, dramatic, introspective and a good person and then people responded to it.

All this confusion has made me take a lot of decisition to my life purpose and then when I'm in the middle of the journey I just fell that I fucked up again. I started studying Drama and I dropped it because I felt it wasn't what I was looking for, then I tried finding my way through the Hard Work and money and I started working in sales in Timeshare but I started feeling like a lack of integrity that I couldn't stand anymore so I quit.

After that I started Thinking which career would work hand by hand with my spiritual journey and I thought about Psycology, but I'm so fucking afraid of realizing its not the fucking way cause I still worry about what my family and friends think about me. If I quit people won't trust me anymore and they won't help me again.

im 21 years old, and since I turned 18 I haved traveled and have taken lots of choices, good ones and most of them also very stupid. I take all these decisions pointing to find my self, I start reading new books also with that in mind but, it's like, everything I learn, I experience doesn't make a real change on me and my happiness. 

 

Whats the real path? 

Whats the exact step by step of this journey, from the low conscience kind of person up way to the higher counsiousness?

am I making the wrong questions?

 

Cesar from México, 21 y/o.

Sorry for my English, If I didn't make myself clear just tell me and I will try other way.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Cesar Alba

[Capethaz]

The question that you have to ask yourself is: What am I? And try to find "yourself" in your direct experience. This is a way to enlightenment and it's called Self-Enquiry. Meditation is another great tool.@Cesar Alba

Edited October 4, 2016 by Capethaz

[Frogfucius]

53 minutes ago, Capethaz said:

The question that you have to ask yourself is: What am I? And try to find "yourself" in your direct experience. This is a way to enlightenment and it's called Self-Enquiry. Meditation is another great tool.@Cesar Alba

Aren't I just consciousness? Aren't I everything within the field of perception? I am the one who sees, feels, touches, hears, thinks, etc. and yet I have no physical form? Is that right?

[aurum]

2 hours ago, Cesar Alba said:

I don't know what the fuck came first. If they said I'm complicated, dramatic, introspective and good person. Or if it's like I really was complicated, dramatic, introspective and a good person and then people responded to it.

Or maybe you're not a person at all

Your spiritual teacher is right. In the end, any conceptualization you use to try and understand yourself will fail. It will need to be discarded, and in that sense, psychology will not help you. But neither will any other subject, including studying enlightenment itself.

However, I wouldn't say that studying psychology is useless. There is life outside of the enlightenment journey, and if psychology is something that feels right to you, go for it.

Beyond that, certain psychological concepts can be useful along the enlightenment journey to study and understand. So I don't see why you shouldn't pursue it unless you really don't want to.

[Prabhaker]

5 hours ago, Cesar Alba said:

I'm in my first months of General Psychology at the university. I decided this career because I think that it will help me on my enlightenment journey but just a few weeks ago I talked to my Spritual teacher and he told me that it won't help at all, because what I'm seeking is in my inside and I can not find it in any conceptualized form. What do you guys think?

 Psychology cannot transform you. It can certainly give you a few insights into the mind, but those insights are not going to be transforming, because transformation always happens from a higher plane. Transformation never means solving problems — remaining on the same plane — that means adjustment.

Psychology is still trying to help you adjust — to adjust to the society which is itself insane, to adjust to the family, to adjust to the ideas that are dominant around you. But all those ideas — your family, your society — they themselves are ill, sick, and to adjust to them will give you a certain normality, at least a superficial appearance of health, but it is not going to transform you.

Psychology can give you a few insights into the mind, but because it cannot take you beyond the mind it can’t be of any help.

5 hours ago, Cesar Alba said:

Whats the real path? 

Whats the exact step by step of this journey, from the low conscience kind of person up way to the higher counsiousness?

am I making the wrong questions?

Be a light unto yourself. Do not follow others, do not imitate, because imitation, following, creates stupidity. You are born with a tremendous possibility of intelligence. You are born with a light within you. Listen to the still, small voice within, and that will guide you. Nobody else can guide you, nobody else can become a model for your life, because you are unique. Nobody has there been ever who was exactly like you, and nobody is ever going to be there again who will be exactly like you.

[DoubleYou]

7 hours ago, Frogfucius said:

Aren't I just consciousness? Aren't I everything within the field of perception? I am the one who sees, feels, touches, hears, thinks, etc. and yet I have no physical form? Is that right?

Actually, the body is still the one that feels, touches, hears, thinks, etc. You are that which is aware of that. 

[Capethaz]

To get enlightened you have to forget about concepts. Just do the work. Philosophy won't you enlightened.

[Pav]

Academic psychology will not help you toward enlightenment. There are some interesting things to learn from it, and some studies are very well done. But on the whole this approach to learning about the psyche is very limited.

The problem with academic psychology is that they want so badly to be labeled a 'scientist'. They attempt to isolate variables and reduce it all to numbers, which makes the studies completely unrelatable to any real situation. Our current computing capabilities are not even close to powerful enough to compute all the variables in something as complex as an interaction between two individuals. As such the variables that they reduce the situation to are so incredibly ambiguous that they are nearly entirely useless.

For some reason there is a tradition of attempting to take samples of an average of the population (which in actuality ends up being the average of middle to upper class, educated, white, western college students). Of course, if you take an average measurement of the population, you will obtain average results (neurosis). They are not studying psychologically healthy or higher conscious people, and you will not learn how to reach psychological health from these sorts of results. The only psychologist I can name who studied psychologically healthy people and transcendent experiences is Abraham Maslow, who seems to now how been disowned from academia. Academic psychologists, in general, deny that transcended states of consciousness even exist.