The real danger to man and civilization is the denial of the fact of a spiritual element in man, and man's capacity to assert it against the swarm of emotion and lure of flesh. Man is to add new dimension in his thinking. He is essentially a spirit encased in a body. This seeking of the eternal in us is as arduous and compelling as it is adventurous and fulfilling. One is compelled to respond to this strange and imperiously compelling fact of spiritual hunger and thirst, seeking and yearning.

Spiritual Development at Stake

Humanistic view places in the foreground a somewhat material humanity. In laying emphasis on man's outward and phenomenal aspect, we are totally tearing him apart from his absolute spiritual entity, the abiding reality of the real personality.

Dr. C. G. Jung has warned against the release of partial tendencies of human behaviour to the detriment of the spiritual development. He wrote that excessive demands of flesh . . ."lead into chaos and a pertinent nihilism, since it abolishes the individual's unity and entirety, and thereby destroys the latter". Even too much intellectualism spells danger to an integrated life. Jung wrote, "Our intellect has accomplished enormous things, whilst our spiritual house has collapsed". It was exactly such lopsided growth of instinct and intellect which has deprived man of his peace. Our greatest sin lies in our paralyzing forgetfulness about the spiritual hunger of life. This is an empirical and psychological approach to sin, not theological. Every neurosis can be understood as an attempt to free oneself from a feeling of inferiority in order to gain a feeling of superiority. Spiritual satisfaction alone brings wholeness and dignity.

The Real Pathology of Our Age

A remarkable contribution to such trends has been given by eminent psychiatrists and psychologists like Jaspers, Baruk Laforgue, Victor Frankl, Mower, and others. All over the West 'logotherapy'--- the medical treatment of man's soul---is gaining much popularity. They hold that unconsciousness of God is more widespread among the elite of society and is, more harmful to them. There is a tendency among the people to conceal the religious feeling. They call this repression the real pathology of our age.

Developing Our Spiritual Resources

Logotherapy sees man driven not only by the will-to-pleasure, or the will-to-power, but by the will-to-meaning. This treatment wants to cure the patients' self-centredness by telling about the spiritual dimension of their life. Health is the balanced distribution of energies over the entire area of life, and ill-health means imbalance within it.

Plato thought of three partners of human being---a monster, a lion, and a man. The monster represents the primitive urges rooted in flesh, the lion signifies the urge to dominate and fight with the environment, the man is the element of spiritual entity. Human mind is what is fed into it, a creation of many inputs! By systematically 'feeding' our mind with higher values of life we can make our mind spiritually inclined. Lack of knowledge about the total man is the cause of neurosis. By developing our spiritual resources we can get rid of the demands of lower life. Psychical imbalance and nonequilibrium are an aberration and can be dissolved by accentuating the energy of the spirit lying dormant in us. Once we realize the importance and glory of spiritual life we are able to ignore the lower urges of life. There will be no divided houses, no dichotomy in our mind. It is extremely dangerous to live in a world of conflicting values. Ego-reduction has been found to be directly proportional to living a rich and full life of spirit rather than the cramped life of endless craving and cringing.

Need for a Spiritual Outlook of Life

Man is to free 'himself' from 'himself'. Tied to ego-centric life, we become restless, cynical, and depressed. Secular lifestyle is maintained at an enormous expenditure of energy. Our misfortune is that we lose touch with it---the core of our own being and get involved in the wilderness of stimulation. Compulsive pleasure-seeking characterizes mania and many others of what are known as 'culture-diseases'. We cannot sleep without the 'peace-pills' due to built-in tensions of the unconscious mind. To stop this drainage, man is to love his spiritual life. It is the source of his creative life, of his freedom, joy and peace.

Vedanta teaches how to get rid of the attachment of body consciousness. Western psychotherapy, whatever its brand, does not know fully the impact of spirit over matter. Over individualization of an individual is the source of all bondage. Vedanta teaches the art of sublimation of emotions by creating a spiritual outlook of life. Round this primary urge of spiritual illumination, the other aspects of man's personality---body, mind, intellect, etc.---will rally and integrate. "God is to religion what Newton's law of gravity is to falling bodies," says Swami Vivekananda. "The psychotherapist must even be able to admit that the ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole and has lost its connection with mankind as well as with the spirit. Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man has never yet been able single-handedly to hold his own against the powers of darkness....Man has always stood in need of the spiritual help which each individual's own religion held out to him It is this that lifts him out of his darkness". (Dr. C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of Soul)