A Practical Approach to Achieving Inner Wisdom

Dante's Path
by Bonney Gulino Schaub, M.S., R.N., Richard Schaub, Ph.D.

Two pioneers in holistic psychology reveal a rejuvenating approach to healing the mind and spirit, using Dante's Divine Comedy as a metaphor to overcome suffering.

Bringing a unique Western approach to the quest for emotional healing and spiritual discovery, Dante's Path addresses the core human struggles - such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and other forms of suffering and uses Dante's Divine Comedy as a metaphor for personal transformation. Readers are taken on a journey of exploration down into the sources of our suffering (Dante's Hell), then into a process of a growing self-awareness of our problems and how to rise above them (Dante's Purgatory), and finally opening up to the direct benefits of our own "wisdom mind" (Dante's Paradise). Along the way are effective, time-tested exercises and meditations for confronting life's greatest worries, coping with episodes of trauma, and understanding feelings of unworthiness and emptiness.

Drawing upon the traditional wisdom of poet-mystic Dante and the work of psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, who created a school of self-development and practical spirituality called psychosynthesis, Bonney and Richard Schaub have used this holistic method to successfully treat hundreds of patients and have taught it to students and other health professionals internationally for more than thirty years.

You have within you all the potential for a special relationship that is waiting to be realized right now. It is the relationship between your everyday personality and a deep source of internal wisdom. Sometimes, at night, you might experience this wisdom as knowledge or guidance you receive in your dreams. Sometimes, during the day, a word or phrase or passing mental image might indicate that your internal wisdom is trying to get through to your conscious self. And, on some occasions, in a moment of true grace, an abundance of internal wisdom might break through to your awareness and illuminate reality more fully than you have ever seen it before.

Around the world and throughout the ages, people have been searching for ways to access this internal wisdom in order to experience the benefits it has to bestow. Tapping into that wisdom will reveal your purpose for living, your destiny, and with that new understanding your fears will relax, the right choices about the directions of your life will become obvious, you will live with greater peace, and more love will flow to and from your mind and heart.

There are many names for this deep source of wisdom. It is the mystic's vision, the artist's muse, the scientist's intuition. The Old Testament prophets received it by seeing visions and hearing voices: Elijah referred to it as "the still small voice within," and when Moses ascended the mountain to receive wisdom about how to lead his people and asked for a name by which to call the source of his guidance, he was told only, "Tell them that 'I Am' sent you." Tibetan Buddhists call this internal wisdom prajna. The Zen tradition refers to the "inner reason of the universe which exists in each mind." Gandhi meditated in order to receive guidance from what he called "the inner light" of universal truth. In the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous it is the "Higher Power."

Dante, in The Divine Comedy, his masterful poetic description of spiritual seeking, personified inner wisdom as his female guide, Beatrice. Carl Jung referred to it as "the Self." And our own teacher, Dr. Roberto Assagioli, called it the "higher self" and founded a school of modern psychology, which he called "psychosynthesis," to develop a human science of the higher self, because it was his belief, as it is ours, that access to this higher self could be studied and taught as a practical, scientific fact. We have come to call it the "wisdom mind" in order to distinguish it from the rational mind in our discussions with patients and students.

To know that this higher aspect of yourself exists and is available to you is certainly good news. The problem, however, is that this may be the first time anyone has told you about it. In order to form a relationship, you must first become acquainted with the other party in this case your own inner wisdom and then begin to nourish the bond between you. The purpose of this book is to help you do just that to educate you about this higher part of your nature and teach you how to be in relationship with it so that you, too, can enjoy its life-changing benefits in the course of your daily life.

The path to forming a relationship with your wisdom mind is not magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a creative process in which, through a series of discoveries, your experience of who you are is gradually expanded. You begin exactly as you are, stay exactly who you are, and, simultaneously, you become more. Your core personality doesn't change; you still function as "you" in the world and in your relationships with others on a daily basis, but you also begin to notice yourself gaining more perspective and purpose and feeling more at peace. "Reality" is no longer just the version presented to you by social convention a life of surviving, functioning, and then relaxing from surviving and functioning. Rather, you will also begin to experience the deeper reality that the saints and mystics have always told us about those moments of wisdom and illumination in which you see into the underlying harmonious order of life. You won't transcend everyday reality; you'll still live out your life like everyone else, but you'll live it with an awareness of belonging to a greater life that you can trust.

Personally, we each trace our own curiosity about the nature of this inner wisdom to a particular early experience. Richard's occurred when, at the age of nineteen, he was lying in spiritual bliss in a tiny, pitch-black, soundproof room in the basement of a Princeton University building as a subject in a study of sensory deprivation being done for United States Navy Astronaut Research. Bonney's occurred when she was just thirteen, sitting in a state of transcendent joy while staring at Monet's Water Lilies in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. While both of us remember even earlier breakthrough experiences of inner wisdom, these events were the conscious turning points at which we became aware of a deeper potential hidden within human nature.

Professionally, we have investigated the human potential for wisdom and illumination through the field of transpersonal ("beyond personality") psychology, which studies the integration of person- ality and spirituality. Developed in the United States in the 1960s, transpersonal psychology has its roots in the work of two European psychiatrists, Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli. They were both students of Sigmund Freud, but they broke away from his psychoanalytic movement because of its failure to address the spiritual aspect of human nature.

We discovered Assagioli's first book, Psychosynthesis, when we were searching for a source of psychotherapy training that included a spiritual component, and we immediately felt at home with his thinking. What impressed us most deeply was his brutally realistic view of the darkness and difficulties of life and the fact that his own commitment to studying the higher potentials in human nature was actually strengthened during a very low and dark period in his life.

Assagioli was born in the Jewish ghetto in Venice in 1888. Having lived through the loss of both parents by the time he was a teenager, he was guided by his stepfather, a physician, to become a psychiatrist and student of psychoanalysis. In 1909, he was named the Italian representative to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, founded by Freud, the then-still-controversial father of psychoanalysis. Assagioli studied for a time in Switzerland, at the same hospital as Jung, but quickly became dissatisfied with psychoanalysis because, for him, it ignored the healthier possibilities inherent in human nature, including higher consciousness and spirituality. At the age of only twenty-two, he broke with the psychoanalytic movement and began to formulate his own method of practicing psychotherapy, founding the first institute for teaching psychosynthesis in Rome in 1928.

In 1940 he was labeled a pacifist and imprisoned by the Fascists. Instead of breaking him, however, his imprisonment provided Assagioli with what he termed "a blessing":

the realization of independence from circumstances, the realization of inner freedom. We should realize the freedoms from fear, want, etc., but the right emphasis should be given that inner freedom without which all others are not sufficient. My dedication is going to be to the task of helping men and women free themselves from inner prisons.

Friends finally secured Assagioli's release, but his troubles were far from over. He remained under strict police scrutiny and, with the advent of the Nazi occupation, was forced into hiding in the Tuscan hills. Shortly after the war, his only child died from an illness he developed while the family was in hiding. It was not until 1950 that Assagioli was able to reopen the psychosynthesis institute, this time in Florence.

Copyright © Bonney Gulino Schaub, Richard Schaub, Ph.D.

About the Author

Bonney Gulino Schaub is one of the country's foremost practitioners of holistic nursing.

Dr. Richard Schaub has more than thirty-five years of experience as a psychotherapist and also teaches meditation and clinical imagery.