Psychology and the spiritual path
The pursuing of our spirituality can deal with many aspects of our personality that clinical psychology has been used for.
Conventional psychology deals with our personalities, who generally fight against the perceived loss off self-centredness that having to cooperate with our higher selves entails. Freud themself was afraid of such an inner journey, claiming it to be the black mud of occultism, so blamed mothers instead. Spiritually, the personality is the higher self's experiment, built for its learning and development as a creator of life, and like any experiment, only deals with what it is designed for.
The limitations of the personality force it to find new ways of dealing with the situations it finds itself in. They struggle valiantly to do this on their own, but eventually they need to call upon their inner connection to their higher self, which is obvious given that it created the personality and those situations. Religions largely pretend to be those connections but often hijack them for their own hegemony. Freudian psychology tries to pretend that that connection is a distraction, while Jungian psychology is still trying to work out the ground rules so largely oversimplifies.
Life is a real-time adaptive evolutionary process, so trying to get to a simple set of rigid rules is unlikely to succeed. Each personality has a purpose (dharma) within the situations (karma) it is in, so given what might appear to be similar situations, the better actions for each personality to take can be quite different. Without a sense of our real purpose, we are more likely to rely upon some trite advice that might have worked for someone else. That is not a real-time process, but applying a third-party formula whose efficacy is assumed to apply in our situation.
To be effective, any system of psychology has to deal with the whole self, so unless a psychologist is so perceptive that they can see our purpose, the most they can do is help our personalities get some thinking tools to cope with our lives. The inner connection is really only open to ourselves, so we must learn to understand ourselves and that connection, typically by self-awareness, contemplation and meditation. The 1960s introduced the West to a lot of Eastern practices and philosophies that were mind-blowing compared to the relative simplicity of the Abrahamic religions.
However, the transition to Western modes of thinking largely dumbed them down, with meditation basically demoted to a form of relaxation rather than being in a state of inner connection. Relaxation is just a step in the process of getting to meditate. The West is preoccupied with relying on externalities and monetising them, so has a vested interest in hijacking our inner connections and redirecting them outwards. Psychology largely proceeds from the same model because it grew up in it.
So what would a better model look like? It must recognise that there are many levels of consciousness, so unless it has a framework that allows that, any foray it makes into the inner will be working from a point of ignorance, like exploring a maze without a map. Abrahamic religions largely suffer from the same lack of a real map, but resorting to hope and winging it from there. In contrast, much Eastern philosophy and religions have lots of maps of varying efficacy.
In trying to explain the inner, many seem to have to meticulous lengths to try to explain every facet, but that often only serves to make the process more difficult, as it gives the impression that a lot more knowledge is needed to even start the process. While some knowledge helps, at least during the early stages, getting to the inner largely needs an experiential approach from which knowledge is gained and built upon, especially given the different dharma we each have, and thus our different learning approaches and lessons.
As a framework for looking at the universe, Theosophy could be considered the psychology of atoms to galaxies because ti covers a huge range of possible consciousness levels, but in a fractal way of thinking, making it easier to conceptualise them, even if we only operate in a small range of them. Each level operates similarly except the medium in which they exist are different. It thus does not have the mental no-go zones that a lot of religious leaders avoid because they either cannot explain them, or fear that their followers may realise that they do not need them.
The advantage of such a framework is that it is easier to place the knowledge that we gather into it as we come across it, rather than having to limit what we take in or reject it altogether, just because our thinking has been limited. That is not to say that Theosophy has not had its fair share of over-explainers, with voluminous and impenetrable tomes being devoted to it, but understanding of the map of the levels of consciousness makes explaining things like karma and dharma less prone to being excessively over simplified to the point of being thoroughly misunderstood and misleading.
All this is not to say that psychology is not capable of being extended, but to do that its many adherents and practitioners have to open up their own consciousnesses to more extensive ways of perceiving the universe while avoiding the pitfalls of over-thinking them. Models of our personality psyches need to be flexible and have space for us to fill them in as we go along so we can adapt them to our own thinking and learning patterns. Also we can each be using our