After rereading my year-old book review of Dr. Gerald G. May’s 1991 The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction, of which you can find posted in its correct place as of Jan. 28, 2002, I wondered if May’s 1982 terrifyingly-thick Will And Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology, of which I was beginning to read, would 1) explain better how sexuality is involved with spirituality and 2) become as boring in the second half of the book. I think serious contemplatives would better understand how God, or God’s servants that one is in close relationship with, can be loved erotically (with erections or orgasms during prayer or sexual intimacy in spiritual guidance meetings!) than I could.

And the second half of the book, you ask? Sometimes repetitive and slow at 321 heavy-duty pages. It took me about a week to get through because it was a lot to think about and evaluate as to my experience in preparation of my review, but even if I didn’t have this review to prepare for, I would have wanted to understand how this book relates to me.

I would like you to participate in a little test right now, before I go into the contents of Will And Spirit, to help you understand how much or perhaps little you need to read the book (or one like it). First find a place that is perfectly distraction-free in terms of environs. A quiet place would be nice and is recommended, but if that’s not possible, keep noise in the distant background at least.

Now just sit there comfortably without moving, except for breathing, and close your eyes without falling asleep for five minutes. The author says ten minutes at the end of the book, so maybe that means you’ll be more contemplative by reading this book! You may think that this exercise means you can plan your dinner or list the ways that your significant other is irritating you, but it simply does not. You are not to think of anything. Only observe your emotions as they come and go, but do not respond to them. May describes it as being like water. You notice your ripples, but only time will get rid of them until you become calm. I suggest also that you think of yourself as lifeless, having an out-of-body experience, just watching yourself.

What this will do is make you aware that your emotions and thoughts do not need to control you and you don’t need to be attached to them. This book may be written for spiritual contemplatives, but stressed-out or depressed people in general will find it helpful as well as thinkers like me.

Contents



CHAPTER ONE: Willingness and Willfulness

May talks about the sometimes secret desire we all have to be able to surrender to a higher intelligence/power, how losing our self-identity and mastery of our lives terrifies us and the difference between willingness and willfulness. He discusses “pop” psychology and “pop” religion to show our confusion in seeking God and growth experiences.

CHAPTER TWO: Foundations for a Contemplative Psychology

There are two forms of spirituality: affective (emotional) and metaphysical (mental). Affective spirituality burns out pretty quickly usually, but metaphysical is too detached and both hinder your search for spiritual truth. Contemplative psychology maintains that “the purest form of knowing is intuition, and it seeks to expand the innate human capacity for intuitive perception,” but also realizes that wisdom comes from integration of observation, logical inference and behavioral learning. Mystery, spirit, superstition, will, consciousness and mind (many pages), awareness and attention and then that awareness exercise described above are then discussed.

CHAPTER THREE: Unitive Experience: A Paradigm for Contemplative Spirituality

The keystone of contemplative spirituality is the unitive or self-losing experiences. May talks about how they are given to you as a gift without any effort or thought on your part (like that exercise if you were able to “keep your hands off your mind” as some famous contemplative was quoted in this book). Drugs give only an artificial unitive experience.

CHAPTER FOUR: Searching: The Quest for Love, Union and Being

Everyone looks for meaning and belonging and May discusses all the ways people do this, how when spiritual searching enters the psychological field and confuses things. Some adults “collect” growth experiences by going to seminars, workshops and such at church where they temporarily feel unconditional love. Psychopathy, obsessiveness and hysteria as three personality types, characteristics of “growth groups” and the need to “just be” are discussed.

CHAPTER FIVE: Fear: Self-Image and Spirituality

If we so long for spiritual surrender and to be loved unconditionally, why is our search for God put in the background of our noisy lives so much? In other words, May wonders why we fear being quiet and alone with God who is within us buried by our emotions and thoughts. He talks about repression and how unitive experiences end with our reactive minds. Also spiritual narcissism.

CHAPTER SIX: Love: The Answer To Fear

This is not about moral good deed doing or pie-in-the-sky spiritual loving. May tells how charity can be superficial in his own experience, that spiritual growth is that willingness to further another’s spiritual growth or love, dangers of compartmentalizing people and God, spirituality and genitality (very interesting how orgasm and spiritual union can be confused) and eroticism as ego defense.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Energy: The Unifying Force

Love is a common form of energy in both Eastern and Western contemplative traditions that is the “basic life force of the universe” or spirit. What we can learn from them and many different psychological approaches is discussed. More on erotic sexuality and passionate spirituality.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Tension, Attention and Attachment
CHAPTER NINE: Good and Evil In Unity and Duality
CHAPTER TEN: Encounter With Evil
CHAPTER ELEVEN: On Being A Pilgrim And Helper

I read these chapters with lessening enthusiasm because I don’t particularly feel self-destructive with problems of being aware or too attached. May was rather ambivalent about whether one should fight evil or ignore it, but I guess we should be aware of it, yet not fascinated with it. I did find May’s condemnation of witchcraft and magic as spiritual narcissism intriguing and his differentiation of remembering and believing an interesting one. Remembering is being aware, recognizing unity (after the unitive experience) and duality and mystery, but believing can just be holding a concept or image of mystery or God.

Final Commentary

Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology was everything I had hoped it would be (plus more I personally didn't need)and it should have been read before or instead of his later book The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction. I think you can tell that there was a lot of information packed into these pages that drew upon Eastern and Western contemplative traditions and their masters as well as psychological insight and my outline leaves out half of it!

Reading this book will not imply that you have a problem that is unusual. Many, many people, even all, will benefit from understanding that the more we try to do something like manage our emotions, the less we will be able to. Gerald G. May, a practicing psychiatrist with a spiritual foundation, wrote this book to help us on our spiritual journey through all the detours that we will probably encounter and have to cross. The first seven chapters held my interest more, but I’m not really into sin and evil and it was progressively more for Christians. He recommends finding a spiritual “location” instead of a faith in order to go deeper into it, but I wouldn’t be able to choose.

I guess I’m also an innocent when it comes to having a spiritual union be like a sexual experience, too. When I took spiritual direction for a year under an older man and then an older woman, when I was involved in a charismatic prayer meeting and when I’m having a contemplative experience while writing or working out, I have had no erotic feelings whatsoever. I do find the idea that many contemplatives do to be rather strange, but I accept that it happens if they are the emotional type,

Now a sexual experience being like a spiritual union…! Obviously if sex is the only way you find God, you need to read this book. But if you have problems getting sexually excited, you need to read this book, too. Heck, looks like that covers about everybody, doesn’t it? :-)


P.S. Gerald G. May, MD, not to be confused with Rollo May whose books I've reviewed, also, has written many other books. I have reviewed books on Zen and Taoism that I highly recommend like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and on the Tao-te-Ching.

Recommended: Yes