The Necessity of Psychospiritual Work in the Time of Transition

Inner Transformation, Spiritual Discernment, and Alignment with Divine Will

By Bernhard Guenther, June 22, 2026

This article is a foundation piece for what I understand as psychospiritual work and why I believe it is essential during the Time of Transition.

We are living in a period of global and cosmic upheaval, where most people are disembodied, dissociated, and dysregulated.

It shows up as a loss of a spiritual orientation, psychological fragmentation, and a deepening disconnection from the Divine in the midst of technological seduction, deceptive spiritual teachings, corrupted religious dogma, and the increasing influence of unseen forces that most people are unaware of.

The world is going through a death-rebirth process at the end of a large evolutionary cycle. The veil is thinning, and humanity is being pulled between materialism and genuine soul awakening.

In times like these, psychological work alone is not enough, and spiritual work alone is not enough.

We need an integrated approach that can meet the whole human being and help us discern what is influencing us, what is calling us upward, and what is pulling us downward.

Many more people now call themselves psychospiritual coaches and therapists. There is a growing wave of practitioners offering psychospiritual work, psychospiritual integration, and psychospiritual coaching under one banner or another.

The intention of this article is to delve deeper into what psychospiritual work entails, based on my understanding and approach, while making the case for why an integral approach is necessary during the Time of Transition: to help ourselves, help others, and align with the underlying evolutionary changes and forces.

I want to be clear that I am not presenting psychospiritual work as a new modality, nor am I claiming to be the authority on it. The term itself is not new, and many traditions, teachers, and practitioners have approached this work in different ways.

What I share here is my own understanding and approach, based on my research, personal experience, and years of applying this work in my own life and with others.

It is informed by many streams of wisdom and practice, including transpersonal depth psychology, Esoteric Christianity, Shamanism, Occultism, the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Roberto Assagioli, Carl Jung, and various contemporary psychospiritual, somatic, and trauma-informed modalities that approach the human being as a holistic body-mind-spirit complex.

This article explores:

• What Is Psychospiritual Work?
• The Limitations of a One-Sided Approach
• Psychospiritual Work Is a Bridge Between Worlds
• Why Differentiation Is Essential in Psychospiritual Work
• The Porosity of the Mind
• The Danger of the Intermediate Zone
• The New Age Astral Circus
• Beyond Mental Discernment and Creating the Divine Center Within
• The Great Unveiling at the End of an Age
• The Dark Age of Materialism and the Spiritual Vacuum
• The Great Work of Alchemical Transformation
• Why This Work Is a Battle That Affects You Beyond Your Personal Life
• The Role of Will in Psychospiritual Work
• Who This Work Is For and Who It Is Not For

What Is Psychospiritual Work?

As the name implies, psychospiritual work is the fusion of psychological and spiritual work: two streams that are often kept apart. Before making the case for joining them, let me describe what each one is based on my approach and understanding.

Psychological Work

Psychological work, in a nutshell, is the process of becoming conscious of the psyche, making the unconscious conscious, and becoming a more integrated whole human being.

By the psyche, I mean the ego, the shadow, inner-child parts, sub-personalities, complexes, childhood wounds, trauma imprints, defense mechanisms, projections, triggers, the anima or animus, the socio-cultural conditioning, and the unconscious drives that shape our actions and our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of reality.

The first thing it reveals is that you are not one unified self. You are a mixture of sub-personalities that you mistake for a single, continuous “I.”

To do this work, you need a map of the psyche, so you can tell what is what. And this is not only an intellectual process. You can fool yourself into believing you are doing the work when you are merely intellectualizing it.

You can be aware of your inner child, your anima or animus, and aspects of your shadow without ever truly integrating any of them.

It is a trap many people in our head-centric Western world fall into, myself included. I remember going deep into Jung’s work and inner child work in the 90s, filling folders with insights about my shadow and my childhood wounds, only to realize almost a decade later that I had merely intellectualized the whole thing.

I had missed the emotional and somatic dimensions needed in the work. I had mistaken dissociation and intellectual understanding for integration and healing. It was a defense mechanism that kept me from dissolving what Wilhelm Reich called the “armor” of my hardened body-mind of stuck and repressed emotions, or from melting what Gurdjieff called the “buffers” that keep us from feeling conscience.

The work is to meet all of it without judgment. To learn to tell one part from another. To feel all feelings, release what was repressed, retrieve what you have projected onto others, hold the tension of opposites within without externalizing, and integrate what has been split off from the psyche.

None of this is new. The idea that we are many parts that must be differentiated and integrated to bring forth the true Self runs through the esoteric traditions, from Esoteric Christianity to ancient yogic psychology to the mystery schools. Gurdjieff put it bluntly a century ago:

“Man has no individual ‘I’, but there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small ‘I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible.

Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, ‘I’.

And each time, his “I” is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

Today, we have new psychotherapeutic and somatic modalities that allow us to do this work in a far more integrated, embodied way than was once possible. I see that as part of the evolution of consciousness itself and a very positive part of the times we’re in.

This work is becoming more refined, more accessible, and more widely understood than ever before, and many individuals are doing great work in this field.

Spiritual Work

Spiritual work is the work of opening upward. It is based on the understanding that a spiritual reality and a higher intelligence exist beyond the material world and what we perceive through our five senses.

It is also based on the understanding and experience that there is a soul-being within us, an expression of the eternal Divine essence, that incarnates into a body over successive lifetimes according to the impersonal Divine law of Karma, which is often misunderstood and oversimplified.

Through this process, consciousness evolves from dense matter toward unification with the Divine and the spiritualization of all life. It is the reach toward the Divine, toward God, toward a higher consciousness that is not the product of our ego.

The key aspects of spiritual work are aspiration, prayer, devotion, purification, meditation, and surrender to the higher Divine Force, which some traditions call God or Great Spirit. It is nothing external to us, not some judging guy in the sky, but the all-pervading Divine Force that created the universe. Nothing can exist outside of God. All is in the Divine. The Divine is in all.

Spiritual work is not an escape. It is not a simple transcendence that leaves the world behind, an exit from samsara and the wheel of rebirth for merely personal liberation, or even a departure from the body into a purely spiritual existence. This is where Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science become central to my approach.

The aim is not to flee the world, deny it, or see it as a burden, prison, or sin, but to transform it: to bring the Divine into mind, life, and body, and ultimately to participate in the spiritualization of matter, the earth, and humanity itself.

We will come back to the full scope of that vision later. For now, it is enough to say that genuine spiritual work anchors the higher Force into the body and into life rather than using spirituality as a means of escape from them.

The Limitations of a One-Sided Approach

Psychological work alone, without aspiration to the Divine, often becomes endless “digging in the mud,” stuck in symptoms, stories, and analysis that trace everything back to childhood.

There is no higher vertical dimension, no higher force to actually transform the nature of one’s being, and no aim beyond a slightly more comfortable life. It can keep us chained to the very past and identities it was meant to free us from.

Spiritual work alone, without psychological work, can lead to spiritual bypassing, spiritual grandiosity, and overestimation of one’s level of consciousness.

It can mistake dissociation and disembodiment for awakening, or misappropriate higher truths like “All is one” and “All is the Divine” to avoid dealing with the shadow, the reality of evil at this level of existence, and the necessity for differentiation.

We become weighed down by the suppressed past without processing it, while we “dream of waking up,” as the ego becomes spiritualized and wounded parts can take on a spiritual or religious identity to feel better, special, and “more awake” than others.

Psychospiritual Work Is a Bridge Between Worlds

It is not either/or. It is integral.

Psychospiritual work brings the Divine impulse into the human experience and helps transmute the wounded ego into an instrument of the Divine, aligned with the soul’s purpose and dharma.

Psychological work processes the past in order to integrate its karmic lessons. Spiritual work aspires to the Divine, which draws us toward the future of who we are meant to become: the true Self, the soul-being, the embodiment of the Divine, or Christ, within. And the two reconcile in the present, through soul embodiment and surrender to the Divine.

Psychological work must go beyond talk therapy and intellectual analysis. It needs to be processed somatically, through the body, allowing unintegrated material to be felt, released, integrated, or transmuted.

This prepares the vessel for the Divine to descend from above and creates space for the true Self to emerge from within.

Spiritual work must go beyond the impulse to escape the world. Integrative spirituality anchors the Divine into the body and into life. It does not retreat from difficulty, but meets it fully engaged in life, becoming a spiritual warrior in service of the Divine, grounded in presence and action, and aligned with dharma as a unique instrument of Divine Will.

Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis is especially relevant here because it emerged from psychoanalysis while also opening toward the spiritual and transpersonal dimensions of the human being.

Assagioli was influenced by Freud, Jung, whom he knew personally and regarded as a major influence, Eastern spirituality, Western mysticism, and Theosophy. He also showed a strong affinity for Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga.

His model includes the lower unconscious, the middle unconscious, the higher unconscious, the conscious “I,” the Self, sub-personalities, and the role of the will in the process of integration and synthesis.

One of Assagioli’s most important contributions was his emphasis on the will.

He argued that many psychological systems neglected the will, even though transformation requires conscious participation.

For Assagioli, the will is not forcefulness or egoic control. It is the capacity to consciously choose, direct attention, align with higher values, and participate in one’s own evolution. It is something many people tend to lack, and it is one of the main reasons people fall off the path. We will explore the importance of the will in psychospiritual work later in this article.

A synthesis of psychospiritual work is key because psychological work can create a false ceiling when it only focuses on the lower unconscious: childhood wounds, trauma, attachment patterns, repressed emotions, and outdated survival strategies.

Psychological work on this level is necessary, but if we stop there, we may remain identified with the past and never open to the higher dimensions of our being.

Self-development and self-actualization can create another false ceiling, getting stuck in the middle unconscious in Assagioli’s model.

This is the realm of much popular self-help, motivational, and “create your own reality” work. It often attempts to adjust the ego-personality to the outer world, focusing on confidence, success, productivity, emotional regulation, thought control, and the creation of the life the personality thinks it wants.

Some of this may be useful at a certain stage. It can help people develop the will, become more functional, disciplined, confident, and capable in the world.

But if it remains centered on the ego-personality and its desires, without ever questioning where those desires come from, it still operates below the threshold of the soul. The little self may improve, but it does not necessarily surrender, purify, or transform itself in service of the higher Will.

In both cases, the work may produce a more functional personality, but not a being aligned with the soul’s intention and the Divine.

Simplifed Assagioli’s Egg Model of Consciousness

Psychospiritual work must move beyond these false ceilings. It includes healing the wounds of the lower unconscious, integrating the personal shadow, and developing a healthy personality, but it does not stop there.

It opens to the higher unconscious, the soul, the deeper Self, and ultimately the Divine, creating a communion between the “I” and the Higher Self, also knwon as the Solar Angel or Guardian Angel in other traditions.

In that process, the little self becomes a conscious transducer for Divine Will, no longer driven by the conditioned desires of the ego-personality.

This is why an integral approach is necessary. The lower must be healed and integrated. The middle must be made conscious and turned into a healthy ego capable of opening itself to the higher Force.

Otherwise, we remain trapped in the past, in an improved ego that we mistake for the true Self, or lost in spiritual inflation without embodiment and true integration.

Why Differentiation Is Essential in Psychospiritual Work

But integration is only possible once we can tell the parts apart. We cannot integrate what we cannot first differentiate.

To do real inner work, we must learn to observe and differentiate our inner world: sub-personalities, programmed ego structures, inner children, Anima/Animus, triggered shadow fragments, Trauma responses, and the True Self.

Without this kind of self-observation and a clear map of the psyche, we can’t truly engage in inner work because we don’t know what we’re actually working with.

That’s why many people mistake their wounded inner child, protector parts, defense mechanisms, the socially programmed ego, or reactive shadow projections for their True Self.

Without Self-Knowledge, you can’t see yourself or reality clearly and are more easily manipulated by forces you’re unaware of.

Most psychological modalities include an understanding or map of the inner parts, even if it is on the most basic level, such as inner-child and protective parts in IFS, or Internal Family Systems.

Carl Jung’s depth psychology also offers a map of the psyche, including complexes, archetypes, and the personal and collective unconscious.

Most people who engage in spiritual work or open themselves up to the unseen higher realms through meditation, prayer, intense breathwork, psychedelics and medicine plants, or make contact with spiritual beings via channeling, mediumship, remote viewing, or calling in spiritual beings, ancestors, or guides, often have no idea what they are opening themselves up to.

This is the imbalance I keep seeing, and it is the reason I focus more on the spiritual side here.

Most people who do serious psychological work have at least some map of their inner parts, even a basic one. Anyone who is sincere in this work develops some awareness of when an inner-child part gets activated or their shadow is triggered.

Most people who do spiritual work have little to no idea, or maybe just a vague one, and overestimate their level of discernment and intuition. They open to the higher planes with no way to tell their own projections, wounds, and sub-personalities from the forces and beings they meet there.

The danger on the spiritual side is often the result of skipped psychological work. Without self-knowledge and inner differentiation, the seeker is far more likely to fall into spiritual bypassing and inflation.

Without the inner map, the seeker cannot tell a vital formation from a true contact, or his own inflated super-ego from a message from an “archangel,” or a fragmented, angry inner-child part from a hostile entity.

However, even without these spiritual practices and openings, everyone is already influenced by unseen forces and beings without conscious awareness. We simply mistake it all for our own inner material and lump it together as “I,” as Gurdjieff said, or we mistake parts of our psyche and inner sub-personalities for entities.

Inner differentiation is imperative for any sincere seeker and for those who intend to enter the spiritual realms and higher worlds.

Rudolf Steiner mentioned that if we haven’t developed deep self-knowledge, we won’t recognize our own inner parts when they reflect back to us, and we’ll mistake them for something foreign or external. He stressed that the safest path into higher realms always begins with honest self-inquiry and understanding our own nature.

The Porosity of the Mind

We are caught in the mind prison of materialistic reality, believing we alone create our thoughts, desires, feelings, and actions.

The sense of an independent identity and persona, separate and impenetrable from everything else, is one of the greatest illusions and spells we’ve fallen under.

The truth is, our mind is porous and permeable. We are transducers of cosmic, universal, and environmental forces, and we are influenced by conscious non-physical beings of the higher and lower realms, elementals, nature spirits, and the unseen forces of nature.

The porosity of the mind has been known to all occult and esoteric traditions. The great occultist Dion Fortune wrote in Psychic Self-Defense:

“We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them.

We need to realize that human consciousness is not a closed vessel. Cosmic forces circulate through it all the time, like seawater through a living sponge.

Whatever emotional state may arise within us is reinforced from the outside. The subjective self only has the kindling; the Cosmos supplies the fuel. Once the fire is started, the cosmic forces of the appropriate type will stoke it.”

– Dion Fortune, Psychic Self Defense

Many traditions have described hostile or adverse forces in various ways.

The Gnostics spoke of the Archons, Native American traditions of Wetiko, Sufi traditions of Shaitans, Arabian esoteric traditions of the Jinn, and Christianity of demonic forces and fallen spirits opposed to the Divine.

Rudolf Steiner described Ahrimanic, Asuric, Luciferic, and Soratic spirits, while Sri Aurobindo wrote of the Pishacha, Rakshasa, and Asura, hostile and adverse forces that, in his words, “seek to maintain falsehood in the world of Ignorance and present it as Truth.”

These forces are like astral parasites and vampiric entities that feed on our energy, false light beings and deceptive guides that masquerade as ascended masters, spirit guides, aliens, or angels of light, as well as egregores and collective thought-forms we feed and are fed by.

Even the psychic projections and thought formations of other people, conscious and unconscious, affect us without our awareness.

But not all unseen influences are hostile. Some are Divine and beneficent: the Divine Presence itself, higher guidance, God, the Higher Self, the soul or psychic being, the Divine Mother, the Shakti force of transformation and protection, the Christ Force, angelic beings, true guides, helpers on the higher planes in genuine service to the Divine, and the elemental forces and spirits of nature.

The Danger of the Intermediate Zone

This also relates to Sri Aurobindo’s warning about the “intermediate zone.”

When the spiritual seeker begins to expand his consciousness beyond the ordinary personal mind and opens to the higher planes, he does not automatically enter into the higher true spiritual realms.

He first enters what Sri Aurobindo called the “intermediate zone,” which overlaps with what many traditions call the astral realm, but is not limited to it.

It is a borderland between the physical and the true spiritual realms: a mixed zone of mental, vital, subtle-physical, and pseudo-spiritual formations where forces, beings, voices, suggestions, visions, half-truths, and deceptive lights can present themselves with great power and conviction.

Aurobindo mentioned that this is the plane where many distorted spiritual teachings originate, often brought forward by forces that imitate the Divine and seek to flatter and inflate the seeker’s ego.

I call this hyperdimensional Counter Intelligence, where truth is mixed with lies and discernment is very difficult, with malevolent beings often baiting with truth and then planting the lie within it, which the gullible seeker, tempted by his ego’s desire for the “marvelous” and “specialness,” swallows at the same time.

This is also the realm people enter when they take psychedelics, ayahuasca, DMT, psilocybin, or other “medicine plants”.

All these substances have become way more popular over the years, and people enter these realms without any understanding of what they are exposing themselves to. I had my share of experiences with them, both the dark and the light side, which I shared in a past article: Altered States of Entrapment: The Plant Medicine Manipulation

As Sri Aurobindo warned:

“The intermediary state is a zone of transition between the ordinary consciousness in mind and the true Yoga knowledge.

These intermediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialize something, or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life, and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose.

This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana, and disastrous unspiritual error. Anyone allowing himself to be taken hold of by one of these beings, who often take a divine Name, will lose his way in the Yoga.

Often, representing themselves as divine powers, they mislead, offer erroneous suggestions and impulses, and pervert the inner life.

One inevitably comes into contact with the vital plane and enters into it in the expansion of consciousness, which results from an inner opening, but one ought never to put oneself into the hands of these beings and forces or allow oneself to be led by their suggestions and impulsions.

This is one of the chief dangers of the spiritual life, and to be on one’s guard against it is a necessity for the seeker if he wishes to arrive at his goal.”

– Sri Aurobindo , Letters on Yoga

The New Age Astral Circus

This also connects to what David Hawkins called the New Age carnival or New Age astral circus.

Hawkins warned that many teachings presented as “spiritual” actually come from astral realms of consciousness. They may be seductive, fascinating, pleasurable, and even seemingly profound, but they do not lead to true awakening or God-realization.

They often appeal to the ego through specialness, secret knowledge, private messages from “God,” “masters,” “ETs,” or other beings, and can easily entrap the seeker in endless distractions.

As Sri Aurobindo warned, this is a zone many seekers must cross, where a great many get lost, tempted, and caught in the occult maze, some never finding their way out in this lifetime.

This understanding is especially important today because the online spiritual space is full of people presenting themselves as “channelers,” “remote viewers,” or transmitters of “codes,” “activations,” “downloads,” and “light language,” often based on contact with the intermediate zone, which they mistake for true higher guidance.

We see this increasingly in the new wave of New Age social media influencers. There is a growing trend of people claiming to be “remote viewers” and presenting all kinds of claims about aliens, galactic missions, and hidden cosmic agendas as absolute facts.

Be especially discerning of anyone who claims to be in contact with “alien beings” as their source of information and guidance.

There will be much more of this in the coming years, especially in conjunction with official UFO disclosure. This is part of a much larger deception by beings and forces that have been around for a very long time. I wrote more about this topic in my recent article here: Official Disclosure and the Rise of the Alien Religion

There is also a lot of spiritual grandiosity at work, with people claiming to have special insights, special access, and knowledge only they can receive. This is one of the ways the Luciferic deception works.

True discernment requires humility and grounded psychospiritual work.

It requires understanding that the astral and hyperdimensional realms are full of deception, mimicry, half-truths, and manipulation.

Just because something feels “high frequency,” expansive, cosmic, or “resonates” does not mean it comes from a higher Divine source or that it is true.

There is also such a thing as false resonance, often rooted in wishful thinking, emotional projection, and the unconscious desire to believe.

The false light can feel very convincing to the spiritualized ego, especially when it flatters our desire to feel special, chosen, advanced, or part of some cosmic mission.

This is why grounded psychospiritual work is so necessary. Without psychological integration, the ego can easily appropriate spiritual experiences. Without spiritual discernment, the seeker can mistake forces of the intermediate zone for Divine guidance.

Beyond Mental Discernment and Creating the Divine Center Within

All of this is beyond the mind to fully comprehend, and the differentiation needed here is not intellectual discernment alone. A purely mental approach can lead to analysis-paralysis, paranoia, and misdiagnosis. Nor is trusting only one’s feelings enough, for they can be misleading and infuenced by positive projections and wishful thinking.

While an understanding of these forces and their influence on us is necessary, along with a basic map or cosmology, we must not become dogmatic about it.

Unfortunately, this often happens when people become too identified with one specific teaching, system, or religion and attempt to interpret everything through only one lens.

What is even more needed is the development of psychic sensitivity, embodied discernment, sincerity, and spiritual perception.

This is not necessarily the same as clairvoyance, but is based on a connection to the true Self and the psychic being within. Just because someone has clairvoyant abilities does not automatically mean they are discerning, sincere, or on a higher level of consciousness.

For the average person who lives only on the surface of the mind and mistakes the ego-personality for the true Self, the inner life appears fairly simple: desires, thoughts, preferences, emotions, needs, moods, health concerns, ambitions, and the usual movements of daily life. It all seems to belong to “me,” lumped together into a single “I.”

But once we go deeper, we discover that the inner world is not simple at all. It is vast, complex, layered, and filled with forces, parts, impulses, and influences we were previously unaware of. What we mistook for one self and a single “I” is actually a whole inner world that must be known, differentiated, mastered, and brought under a higher Divine order.

The ultimate aim of psychospiritual work is to create a Divine center within us, bring forth the true Self, and align with Divine Will amidst all these influences, forces, and beings, all of which play their part in the evolution of consciousness, including evil.

As Sri Aurobindo described it:

“The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life.

But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, we find ourselves surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.

We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature.

Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.

Moreover, we find that inwardly, too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world.

The sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion. We do not exist in ourselves. We do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude.

Our mind is a receiving, developing, and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed, from moment to moment, a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside.

Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves.

A large part comes to us from others or from the environment… But still more largely they come from universal Nature here, or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences.

For we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness… from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use of for the manifestation of their forms and forces.

Of all this, we have to take account. To deal with it. To know what is the secret stuff of our nature and its constituent and resultant motions.

And to create in it all a divine centre, and a true harmony and luminous order.”

— Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

The Great Unveiling at the End of an Age

In my article The Time of Transition: The End of an Age and the Birth of a New Humanity, I explored the larger esoteric and evolutionary cycle and context of this period.

Humanity is in the midst of the death of an old era and the birth of a new one.

What we are witnessing is not only a political, economic, social, or ecological crisis. At its root, it is a spiritual crisis: a crisis of meaning, a disconnection from the Divine, and the exposure of a humanity trapped in ego-consciousness and a materialistic worldview.

The Time of Transition refers to the threshold between world ages. A successful transition depends on whether enough individuals consciously engage in the Great Work: becoming individuated, purified, spiritualized, and capable of anchoring the Divine Force within and in the world.

From the perspective of the Yuga Cycle, we are at the end of the Kali Yuga, the darkest and most materialistic phase of the Great Year of a 26,000-year cycle. (Note: There is much debate about when the Kali Yuga has ended or is ending. For an in-depth exploration of this topic, read my recent article and linked resources)

This is the age in which humanity has become the most separated from the Divine, the most identified with the body, the ego, the lower nature, and the material world.

It is also the age in which hostile forces have the greatest access to humanity through fear, disembodiment, fragmentation, ignorance, the lower nature, and the loss of conscious connection to the spiritual world.

The transition out of this age is not smooth or comfortable. It is a purification phase. Everything hidden is being brought to the surface: the personal shadow, the collective shadow, karmic residues, and the hidden forces that have been influencing humanity from behind the veil.

It is the apocalypse, which is the great unveiling.

We are not alone, and we’ve never been alone. We are approaching what some esoteric traditions have called “the unveiling of the heaven of the gods.”

There are forces and beings from unseen realms that have influenced humanity for thousands of years, and no one is exempt from their influence.

Part of spiritual work and the awakening process is becoming aware of what influences us and developing the discernment to recognize what is what.

As one opens to higher levels of awareness and begins to develop spiritual perception, contact with these beings and forces becomes inevitable in one form or another. This is why inner differentiation is so essential: to clearly recognize what to accept and integrate, and what to reject.

The thinning of the veil not only reveals higher spiritual realities. It also exposes us more directly to deception, impostor beings, false light, and the occult forces that have been influencing humanity for a long time.

At the same time, powerful Divine forces are guiding and assisting humanity through this critical phase.

At the hyperdimensional spiritual level, this manifests as a “war through us.” The most critical choice is what we align ourselves with and what we consent to.

The Dark Age of Materialism and the Spiritual Vacuum

The modern world is marked by a strange contradiction.

On the one hand, we have extreme technological advancement, artificial intelligence, material comfort, and unprecedented access to information.

On the other hand, we see increasing spiritual emptiness, psychological fragmentation, disembodiment, moral inversion, loss of meaning, and the growing mechanization of thought and consciousness.

Material progress is not the same as spiritual evolution. A more advanced technology does not mean a more awakened humanity.

In fact, when technology develops without spiritual maturity, it can become a tool of further enslavement and disintegration.

Artificial intelligence and transhumanism are expressions of the final temptation of materialism: the belief that consciousness can be reduced to information, that the human being can be upgraded through technology alone, without inner purification, embodiment, soul development, or alignment with the Divine.

This is the spiritual vacuum of the modern age, which Rudolf Steiner warned about.

When the connection to the Divine is lost, and people lack an inner spiritual orientation and are overly externally oriented, with a predominantly materialistic view of themselves, humanity, and the world, something else fills the void.

Adversary and hostile beings fill that void and take over humanity, working through humans to implement a spiritually dead, materialistic world. Hostile spirits are attracted by spiritual emptiness caused by materialism and mechanical, passive living.

As people withdraw from spiritual aspiration and inspiration, their physical bodies become exposed to the influence of non-human, hostile forces. Rudolf Steiner warned that future generations would have weakened or absent souls, making their bodies vulnerable to possession by demonic entities.

The true evolution of humanity is not the replacement or enhancement of the body by technology, or the merging with the machine.

It is the spiritualization of the human being.

It is the awakening of the soul, the purification of the lower nature, the embodiment of the higher consciousness, and the transformation of mind, life, and body through the Divine Force.

The Great Work of Alchemical Transformation

This is why, in my view, a more integrated and broader form of psychospiritual work, as outlined here, is so necessary during the Time of Transition.

Without it, humanity becomes increasingly vulnerable to the forces that seek to pull consciousness downward into mechanization and spiritual amnesia.

As I explored in a past article, the aim of this work is not merely healing, self-improvement, or becoming a more functional personality. The deeper aim is alchemical transformation: from the lead of the lower nature to the gold of the true Self.

In the esoteric Christian tradition, this is related to the “second birth,” the inner rebirth through which the old self dies, and the soul-being begins to emerge.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, this points toward the emergence of the Divine Gnostic Being: the transformed human being no longer ruled by the lower nature, carnal desire, ignorance, fear, disease, aging, and death.

This is not an escape into some imaginary heaven elsewhere. The Divine Force is not only meant to transform the individual but also life and the earth itself. The aim is not to leave the world behind, but to bring the higher consciousness into mind, life, body, matter, and the earth.

But we cannot skip any steps.

It is tempting to bypass the difficult work, get trapped in corrupted religious dogma, get lost in New Age fast-food spirituality, fall into spiritual narcissism, or succumb to the Luciferic temptation of believing one has already “ascended,” been “saved,” been “raptured,” or one is already “awake”.

The real process requires both descent and ascent. It requires a confrontation with the darkness, falsehood, our wounds, and evil within ourselves, the very things we so easily project outward and deny in our own being.

Nor will things improve simply by trying to fix the outer world while remaining unchanged within, or by desperately searching for a “safe place” and falling into materialistic survival mode.

The true refuge is not found in external security alone. It begins with seeking the Kingdom within, bringing forth a grounded spirituality, and consciously engaging in the Great Work of purification, embodiment, and alignment with Divine Will.

Why This Work Is a Battle That Affects You Beyond Your Personal Life

As Sri Aurobindo noted, engaging sincerely on the path, anchoring the Divine Force, and transforming one’s being and the world is to enter an inner battle.

It takes the form of a spiritual war because there are forces invested in keeping you asleep. They especially target those who are on the verge of a deeper awakening.

“Accepting life, [the spiritual warrior] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too, along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load.

Therefore, his Work has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country.

He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world.”

— Sri Aurobindo

Why is that? Because once your consciousness expands through sincere inner work, you will inevitably come into contact with various forces and beings that are battling over humanity.

You do not live in a solipsistic vacuum. Aurobindo also mentioned that the same battles return, even after you believe you have won them. The forces you face operate far beyond your personal life, and they have, in his words, “an almost endless right to recurrence.”

He said that because your inner existence has been enlarged, you are no longer fighting only for yourself. You have entered into solidarity with the being of others because, as he puts it, “in himself he [the spiritual warrior] contains the universe.”

In other words, the more sincere you are in this work, the more you help transform and heal the world.

As you raise your level of consciousness through this inner purification and shadow integration and come more into alignment with the Divine Force, your whole being has a positive effect on others and the world.

Your actions, as they become more aligned with the higher Will, have more powerful effects than those of social activists or conspiracy theorists who split psychologically, externalize all evil and darkness, never look within, and only fight shadows on the wall.

This path is not passive and doesn’t lead to inaction. It leads to right action in alignment with the higher Will.

The Role of Will in Psychospiritual Work

This battle is not won by aspiration alone. We need to engage the will.

Many people like the idea of awakening, individuation, and living a more authentic life based on their true Self.

They like the idea of alignment with Divine Will and living in alignment with their dharma. However, many people underestimate how important the will is in this work.

Some even mistake spirituality for being passive, just going with the flow, doing what they feel like, and mistaking feelings for intuition or Divine Guidance.

Others do not realize how deeply this work can affect their lives, including relationships, marriages, friendships, careers, identity, self-image, and everything they hold dear and are attached to. They also underestimate how much disillusionment is part of the process.

Psychospiritual work is not just about having insights, reading spiritual books, watching videos, or having peak experiences.

Nowadays, many people think awakening means scrolling social media, liking spiritual posts and memes, and watching 30-second clips, mistaking quick dopamine hits for “resonating” and “awakening.”

But real inner work is not a pastime you engage in whenever you feel inspired.

It is not a self-improvement or self-actualization program for the ego-personality we mistake for the true Self.

Real inner work requires the capacity to stay with what is uncomfortable and often painful to see. This is where the will becomes essential.

Engaging sincerely in psychospiritual work and individuation will bring up all kinds of internal and external resistance, along with distractions, rationalizations, excuses, uncomfortable feelings, and many other defense mechanisms that keep us from engaging in the work.

I’ve seen again and again how much people lie to themselves and make up all kinds of justifications.

And I have seen it within myself as well: the excuses and lies I was telling myself, realizing what both Carl Jung and Gurdjieff also saw:

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”

– Carl Jung

“To speak the truth, one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

The programmed ego structure and wounded subpersonality parts stuck in grandiosity or self-pity and inferiority do not readily give themselves up. They prefer the familiar and the comfortable.

We need to observe ourselves honestly, stay present with uncomfortable emotions, face our shadow, withdraw projections, and take responsibility for the parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

Spiritual will is not the same as egoic will or forceful doing.

It is not about pushing or striving from the personality. It is certainly not ambition. It may use the ego as its instrument, but it originates from deep within the soul as a movement to align with the Divine.

It is the strength to choose truth over comfort. It is the capacity to recommit when part of you wants to quit. It is also the ability to feel all feelings without suppressing them or projecting them onto others.

Many people begin inner work because they feel inspired or called to do so. But once the work becomes challenging, the old personality often comes up with a million excuses:

“Now is not the right time.”

“This is too much.”

“I’m just going with the flow.”

“I’m busy. I don’t have time.”

Sometimes those statements may be true. But often they are the voice of resistance disguised as guidance.

This is why spiritual language can easily justify avoidance and a weak will. The ego can use “trust,” “flow,” “alignment,” and “surrender” to avoid the very friction that would actually help the soul grow.

The ego wants healing, awakening, and transformation on its own terms, without the death of its cherished self-images. It wants the fruits of the Work without the inner purification the Work demands.

Psychospiritual work requires the will to stay focused when the lower nature wants to scatter our attention, avoid discomfort, or retreat back into the known and familiar.

It requires the will to recognize our triggers, self-importance, victim stories, hidden agendas, and self-deceptions.

It also requires the willpower to push through the resistance of hostile forces that interfere with any sincere seeker, trying to pull him away from the path.

Real psychospiritual work requires both receptivity and effort. It requires openness to Grace and guidance, as well as the willingness to do one’s part.

As it is said, God helps those who help themselves. We need to build a strong will before we can offer it to the Divine and become conscious instruments of Divine Will.

Who This Work Is For and Who It Is Not For

The psychospiritual work I have described in this article is not for everyone.

This is not a value judgment of anyone’s worth. It is not about someone being “better” or “worse.” It is simply a matter of readiness and sincerity in the context of the evolution of consciousness.

There are vastly different levels of consciousness within humanity. We are all one, but we are not all the same, and not everyone is ready for this work.

It is not for people who are still firmly locked into a materialistic worldview and cannot even entertain the possibility of God, the Divine, spiritual realities, unseen forces, karma, reincarnation, or the evolution of the soul.

This work is not for those firmly identified with atheism, materialism, or the belief that consciousness is merely produced by the brain, nor is it for those who take a strictly reductionist approach to psychology and see the human being as nothing more than biology, conditioning, chemistry, and neurological processes.

There is no use trying to convince someone who is not ready to see beyond the material world, especially if they demand “scientific proof” for God or for realities that cannot be reduced to the limitations of materialistic science.

At the same time, this work is not for dogmatic religious believers who externalize God and evil, project their shadow onto others, and remain rigidly identified with their religious doctrine.

It is not for those who demonize or dismiss psychology as a whole because of their religious fundamentalist beliefs. It is especially not for those who believe their faith, scripture, teacher, church, lineage, or tradition is the only and ultimate truth.

Both extremes, materialistic reductionism and religious dogmatism, create their own closed systems that keep humanity entrapped and vulnerable to the forces of darkness.

It is not for those who are still stuck in blame toward their ex, parents, the government, the elite, any political or ideological group, entities, or anyone else, who keep complaining about the world, see it as a “prison planet” they need to escape from, and refuse to take responsibility for their outer life and inner world.

It is not for those looking for a quick fix or shortcuts, and who are not willing to “pay with themselves,” as Gurdjieff said, through effort and spiritual will.

It is also not for those who merely want “spiritual experiences,” want to take on a spiritual identity, are just curious, or believe spirituality is a trendy thing to get into.

It is something beyond all of this, and for people who sense a deep call from the soul within to align with something higher.

It is for those willing to do both the psychological and the spiritual work, who understand that neither half is enough on its own.

It is also for those willing to look within, to own their shadow, and to withdraw the projections they have cast onto others, the world, and even onto God.

It is for those ready to embark on the path of Individuation, where the question shifts from “What do I want?” and “How can I manifest my desires?” to “Who am I?” and “What does the Divine seek to express through me?”, restoring a direct relationship with the transpersonal.

It is for those who are ready to surrender their personal will to Divine Will.

And it is for those who long to become a conscious instrument of the Divine, knowing that their own transformation is also in service to the world.

This is the path of the spiritual warrior.

“The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves.
They are in a complete prison of their weaknesses.

Understand me right, I do not need followers.
I am rather interested in finding the real warriors of the new world.”

– Gurdjieff, The Last Hour of Life

Engaging in psychospiritual work requires an inner opening, a call from the soul within that is ready to embark on this path with sincerity, humility, and self-responsibility, and a willingness to give oneself to the Divine.

Even if that call is still met with resistance, fear, and doubt, at least a seed has started to sprout.

It is for sincere seekers, spiritual warriors, and those who sense, deep within, the importance of this Time of Transition and the work necessary, and who know that the nature of true transformation is a battle.

At the same time, they embrace it with an inner joy born of their soul essence and independent of outer circumstances, for they know, deep inside, that its successful outcome is glorious, magnificent, and beyond what the mind can comprehend.

They know that this is why they came here and that they have been here many times before. They have crossed the threshold, and there is no turning back.

There is only the call to accept their role as servants of the Divine, however it may manifest in their lives and through their unique path.

Rejoice and Godspeed.

From veilofreality.com

Your Tax Free Donations Are Appreciated and Help Fund our Volunteer Website

Disclaimer: We at Prepare for Change (PFC) bring you information that is not offered by the mainstream news, and therefore may seem controversial. The opinions, views, statements, and/or information we present are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, espoused, or agreed to by Prepare for Change, its leadership Council, members, those who work with PFC, or those who read its content. However, they are hopefully provocative. Please use discernment! Use logical thinking, your own intuition and your own connection with Source, Spirit and Natural Laws to help you determine what is true and what is not. By sharing information and seeding dialogue, it is our goal to raise consciousness and awareness of higher truths to free us from enslavement of the matrix in this material realm.