Essay On Spirituality And Spirituality

In this paper two topic from the Psychology and Spirituality course will be discussed in regards to spirituality and their influence on my personal life. I will examine how I have grown and what I have learned from the week on Spring Lake ranch and how I wish to continue moving forward in my attempt to be spiritual and build a closer relationship to God.

love

Much of my life, love has been defined by an unexplainable and uncontrollable feeling that burns inside your soul. One that when you look at a person you will just know and the rest will be history. This definition of love I grew up love was also demanding, controlling, dependent, and selfish. But still it was something to be desired and something everyone couldn’t wait to feel. To love

In the words of Peck, love is defined as an extension of ones self for the purpose to nurture ones own or another’s growth. Peck also emphasizes on the fact that to love someone is an act of will, it is choice made by the individual and isn’t based upon feelings, their will be many times in a relationship where an individual won’t feel like loving their spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, or in terms of non romantic relationships, friends and family. To will oneself to love someone is to love the other person even when you don’t feel like it. To wake up each day knowing that you choose to love this person. The difference between the worlds view on love and Pecks’ view on love is that when things get difficult you either leave because the feeling is no longer there or you choose to love the love the person through the difficulties that you both face and come out of it stronger. Peck describes what love is and what it isn’t. What he describes is much different from what the world describes it as. The world describes it as dependent, to live without your love is to die as displayed in Shakespeare “ Romeo and Juliet”. Peck states in his book that in order to truly love another person one must be able to live without that person. This implies the will to live and love this person despite being able to live with out the other

The unknown is something human can’t wrap their heads around so like mystery humans try to figure it out, to discover it so that mankind may not be fearful of death. In doctor Macknees’ paper “Is there Life after Birth?” he examines the fears of death and how it’s related to humans fear of living. The three topics being fear of what happens after death, fears related to the process of dying, and fears of the loss of life. Each topic has 3 subtopics that go deeper into the thoughts that many may have as death approaches them or fears for the future. The three that connected the most to me would be under the topic of fears related to loss of life, subtopics fear of mastery, fear of incompleteness or failure, and fear of separation. In my last paragraph about death I will go deeper into my thoughts behind these and their relation to my fears of life as described by Charles Macknee. Death as described by the class of Psychology and spirituality is the end of all that is familiar and entering into something beyond our control but also beyond what our minds can comprehend. Death is something I think many of us don’t want to confront, whetherits our own or it’s a loved ones. I know that it is something I never like talking about or thinking