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Sat 12 Nov 2005

The OVP and the Spiritual Masters of the Occult

Rogers’ Organismic Valuing Process (OVP)

According to Rogers man has an inner guide, which he termed the “Organismic Valuing Process”. This OVP was deemed by him as infallible and is responsible for leading the person into self-actualization. Those experiences that promote actualization are good and desirable, thus we consider them as positive. Experience is for Rogers the highest level of authority, the “touchstone of validity”. He is convinced that the only reality in which we can be certain is our own subjective world of experience; we are what we experience, reality is what we experience. However, this makes our fallible and often erred senses the final arbiter of reality. Therefore, our flawed senses cannot be relied upon to give us always a true or proper sense of reality.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly I do not know, but Rogers has created with this inner guide (OVP) a natural stepping stone for the New Age, occult doctrine that teaches us to submit to Inner Guides and Spiritual Masters. To the extent then that these forces are able to manipulate our experiences, then they effectively control our thinking and direction and become our fulcrum for reality. Conveniently, then since, the goal of the OVP is actualization; the OVP becomes the arbiter of good. Conversely, Rogers sees parental and societal behavior, as the culprit that keeps us from becoming a fully functioning person. If, however we are the product of evolution, then evolution is also the process responsible for man’s parental and societal behavior. How is it that evolution has chosen to progress in such conflictive manner as to harm our “well-being”? In every case the theoreticians cannot escape the need to assign categories of good and evil, yet in a naturalistic system this is, what Rogers would call incongruence; there is no good and evil, there just is.

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Sat 12 Nov 2005

Jung and the Shadow

Posted by Henry under Philosophy , Psychology , Religion , Occult , Naturalism
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Jung and the Shadow

The evolutionary presupposition that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is also reflected in the field of psychology by the concept that Freud’s personality theory developed, namely that our personalities reflect and are developed determinalistically by our past. Jung went a step farther and posited that we have an evolutionary collective memory from our collective past that creates in us a collective unconsciousness, which deeply affects our personality.

“Jung believed that just as each of us accumulates and files all of our personal experiences in the personal unconscious, so does humankind collectively as a species, store the experience of the human and pre-human species in the collective unconscious. This heritage is passed to each new generation.
Whatever experiences are universal- those that are repeated relatively unchanged by each generation- becomes part of our personality. Our primitive past becomes the basis of human psyche, directing and influencing present behavior.” (Theories of Personality, by Duane Schultz, Sydney Ellen Schultz, Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., Pacific Grove, California, 1998, pg. 92)

He then moved one step further and claimed that our personalities were not just determined by our past, but could also be influenced by our future, as man seeks self-actualization. He, like Fromm, also saw man as having a transcendent need and theorized that the drive to self-actualize would overpower his influences in his early developmental years. This opened the door for the “human potential movement”, which later developed as a natural outworking of this and created an escape from the determinism and pessimism of Freud. Although, Jung conceptualized the conflict in a different terminology, he also was unable to provide a real solution, within the naturalistic framework. However, he must also be credited for stepping forth and admitting that man does have a transcendent need, even though he cannot create a basis for this; this admission is quite a step in a naturalistic system and is evidence of its deficiency to explain the way man is.
I want to digress a bit here, because I believe that it is crucial in understanding the direction and in recognizing the forces behind that direction in the evolution of existential philosophy. It is well documented that Jung’s mother was steeped in the occult and that he periodically spoke to “apparitions”.

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Sat 12 Nov 2005