Achieving Inner Wisdom, Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 4)

Assagioli was the first modern Western doctor to incorporate worldwide spiritual and meditative practices directly into his work with patients. By the late 1950s, word of his approach had spread, professionals from around the world began to seek him out as a teacher, and, since that time, many others have begun to emphasize the importance of integrating spirituality into the paradigm for seeking mental and emotional health.

But if our teacher was Roberto Assagioli, you may well be asking by now, why have we called our book about the educational and creative process of connecting with inner wisdom Dante's Path rather than Assagioli's? The answer is that Assagioli's own path actually led him back to the work of the fourteenth-century poet-mystic Dante Alighieri. Like so many of his countrymen, Assagioli had studied Dante's poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy, in which Dante's alter-ego, the Pilgrim, goes on a spiritual journey through the realms of hell, purgatory, and paradise. In Assagioli's case, however, that study went well beyond the literary to become a formidable influence on his own work.

For Assagioli, Dante was a spiritual sage who had, in his poem, mapped the entire course of the spiritual path Assagioli himself had traveled and along which he was guiding his patients. In his notes on the suffering of his psychiatric patients, he refers again and again to Dante's hell. In his notes on people's struggles to live with less fear and more freedom, he refers to Dante's purgatory. And in his references to spiritual states of being, he speaks of the poet's paradise. Dante had, in fact, visited all the realms of human experience and discovered both the worst and the best in human nature. For the modern psychiatrist, the visionary poet was a realistic teacher of enlightenment who had, six hundred years before Assagioli's commitment to freeing others from their inner prisons, dedicated his own work to leading future generations "from misery to bliss." Dante paints a brilliantly illuminative word picture not only of the states of misery and bliss but also of the sometimes difficult path we must travel on our journey from one to the other, and Assagioli supplies both the modern understanding of human psychology and the practical methods available to us for having direct experiences of our natural higher potentials.

As psychotherapists and teachers of other health professionals, we emphasize the lifelong practicality of following this path to the realization of wisdom and illumination because, in our thirty years of practice, we've found that many of the problems we all have as human beings can't be solved simply by rearranging the furniture of our personal and professional relationships. Many of our problems function as disguises for the real problem our knowledge that we are but temporary citizens of life and that everyone and everything we see passes away. This is a fact everyone would prefer to deny, and yet much of the fear, worry, doubt, and anger we live with on a daily basis flows inexorably from this unalterable truth. Our promise to you is that, by following the path we have traveled in the footsteps of Dante and Assagioli, and that we will map for you in the pages that follow, you, too, will be able to find a way of relaxing the grip of your fears and deepening your awareness of your intimate connection to the whole of the harmonious, eternal, interpenetrating, mysterious universe. It is a transformation everyone, including you, is capable of achieving, and your way of accomplishing it is by developing an ongoing relationship with your guiding internal wisdom.

In addition to making this promise, however, we also recognize the importance of acknowledging the obstacles that block many of us from realizing this innate, universal potential. All these obstacles, as you will learn, are really forms of fear. Fear has many faces, some of the more obvious of which are anxiety, insecurity, hurt, and worry. It can, however, also be disguised as anger, greed, envy, negativity, addiction, betrayal, or violence. Using Dante's map of hell as a guide, we will lead you on a tour of all our shared human fears so that you will be able to recognize those that are most prevalent in your own life. And, once you've gained that self-knowledge, we'll teach you safe, effective, time-tested methods of liberating yourself from your fears each time they threaten to block your progress.

The methods Assagioli used in his practice, and that we use with our own patients, are forms of applied meditation and imagery that you, too, can use every day. As you practice them yourself, you will begin to experience more and more liberation from fear, and, with the quieting of your fears, you will become better able to hear the subtle voice of your wisdom mind. We will then guide you to develop and strengthen your relationship with that higher part of your nature so that its benefits will gradually be able to flow more and more freely. Inspired by Dante and Assagioli, we had been thinking about writing this book of practical spirituality for many years when the events of September 11, 2001, motivated us to finally put our thoughts into action. Tragedy, as we had already learned all too well, is often the catalyst that moves people to become spiritual seekers. We had been working with the therapeutic uses of imagery and meditation for many years when, in the 1980s, we began to see, both in our practices and in our community service work, more and more people who were either dying of AIDS or losing friends and loved ones to that dreadful disease. And, over and over, we saw our patients reviewing the meaning of their lives and searching for the spiritual strength to cope with their devastation. These people were truly in a "hellish" state, and they were suddenly struck by the realization that what-ever material success they might have achieved, it was no more than temporary. They required some deeper inner wisdom or spiritual awareness to comfort them and give them courage.

We have also worked at various points in our careers in medical centers and drug and alcohol treatment agencies and have seen many forms of suffering that required us to help people draw down deep into themselves for strength. But hellish states, suffering, and the desire for deeper wisdom are not the sole property of people with frightening illnesses. We have also been therapists for hundreds of people who are simply discontent with their life as it is, people who have come to believe there must be something "more" to life than what they are experiencing but who don't know how or where to find it people who are, perhaps, very much like you.

Finally, going beyond these clinical experiences, we have had the joy of leading groups of people on several Sacred Art Tours of Florence during which we were able to introduce them to the universal spiritual wisdom embodied in Renaissance art and teach them how to practice visualization meditation as they sat before those sacred paintings. Having witnessed the illuminations experienced by so many of our travelers during their meditation, we became more convinced than ever that the tools for touching and tasting deeper wisdom were, quite literally, right in front of our eyes.

With this book we will guide you, as we have our patients, our students, and our Florentine travelers, on your own journey to discovering your inner wisdom. As both fellow seekers and spiritual scouts, we offer you not only a map to make the trip less confusing, but also a clear promise of the transformational rewards it will bring.

Dante and His Poem by Domenico di Michelino

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.