An Unknown Destiny
Terror, Psychotherapy, and Modern Initiation: Readings in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Steiner
Description:... Beginning with a consideration of Nietzsche's inflammatory and critical insight that the modern world is framed by the death of God, Michael Gruber confronts contemporary disenchantment and its necessary offspring, the "universalization of terror." By making truth relative, negating the value of beauty, and rendering questions about the good dubious if not obsolete, terror permeates all aspects of our psychosocial existence with the threat of dehumanization. In response to this terror, which is the fundamental mood of our time, Gruber advocates re-imagining our destiny as a path of initiation.
Describing an inner awakening to the spiritual world, whose earthly manifestation of its inherent divinity invites and necessitates our conscious participation, Gruber offers readings and practices that promote the incarnation of "noble souls." Referring to the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Steiner, An Unknown Destiny describes how psychotherapy can move beyond healing the ego to transcending the ego. Gruber shows how opening the soul to meditative or intuitive forms of thinking can contribute to the development of new soul faculties of perception and to the experience of moral freedom. Most important, he shows how the incomplete and continuously evolving Mystery of Golgotha can inspire the emergence and presence of modern human beings infused with Christ consciousness--reverence, wisdom, peace, and love.
"An Unknown Destiny is like a stream of fresh water in which all psychotherapeutic approaches would do well to immerse and possibly transform. Gruber's reading of the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Steiner concerning the realm of terror that pervades our world, is not only a tour de force of reflection upon the writings of these seminal figures, but a clear and highly accessible one. Michael Gruber has done a great service to psychotherapy. I learned a lot." --Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Ph.D., Jungian analyst, author of The Mystery of Human Relationship and The Black Nightgown
"Michael Gruber brings together key points in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Steiner to point out the connection between psychotherapy and the path of initiation appropriate to our time. In this way, he locates the essential spiritual challenges from our greatest thinkers. Gruber has an appreciation of the mythic that approaches, at times, that of A.K. Coomaraswamy. But he does more. He shows how living thinking, the fresh experience of being, and the awakening from technology's hypnotic thrall, can all become realities for us. In doing so, Gruber clears a path for the self-aware individual to become no longer a passive recipient of mass culture, but a point source of love and wisdom." --
Michael Lipson, Ph.D, psychotherapist, author of
Stairway of Surprise "Michael Gruber has written a truly remarkable, courageous-beyond-belief book. He shows how modern psychology serves terrorist structures of consciousness. He further shows that only a truly spiritual psychology can break through these forms. His creative reading of Nietzsche opens the path of therapy as modern initiation. His work with Rudolf Steiner reveals the presence of pathologies of spirit that are still being approached as psychological difficulties; and how to approach them anew. Finally, his understanding of Heidegger shows the way to the imaginal reality of the unity of person-world. A truly breakthrough book " --
Robert Sardello, Ph.D., author of
Love and the World and
Silence, cofounder and codirector of The School of Spiritual Psychology
CONTENTS: Foreword by Robert Sardello, Ph.D.
Introduction
- "From Ornithology to a Love Supreme: Overcoming the Forces of Gravity, and the Teaching of Amor Fati"
- "Zarathustra's Convalescence: Cognitive Expansions and Inner Wisdom"
- "With Nietzsche on the Road from Revenge to Rede Show description