False Gods and the Two Intelligent Questions of Metapsychiatry.docVIP

Religions 2012, 3, 339–343; doi:10.3390/rel3020339 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 /journal/religions Article False Gods and the Two Intelligent Questions of Metapsychiatry Bruce S. Kerievsky 49 Timber Hill Drive, Monroe, NJ 08831, USA; E-Mail: bruce@; Tel.: +1-516-662-9709 Received: 24 February 2012; in revised form: 6 April 2012 / Accepted: 11 April 2012 / Published: 24 April 2012 Abstract: This paper explains how the spiritual teaching known as Metapsychiatry, developed by psychiatrist Thomas Hora, employs two questions as its focal educational method. Those questions facilitate phenomenological discernment of the source (i.e. the meaning) of our problems in living and help students and patients to understand the real nature of God. Perceiving our existentially invalid attachments and the inevitable suffering they produce encourages us to seek inspiration from God. Keywords: phenomenology; meaning; God; love; intelligence; embarrassment; values; spiritual; idolatry; truth Introduction Half a century ago, a Hungarian-born American psychiatrist, Thomas Hora, M.D., created a spiritually oriented teaching and psychotherapeutic method that he called Metapsychiatry. Its name implies that it intends to transcend the limitations of conventional psychiatry in relieving human suffering. Dr. Hora described it as a method of realizing overlooked truths of human existence. The teaching is characterized by precise definitions of various states of consciousness and of spiritual values in a way that reveals the various ideas underlying such states. It addressed life problems and solutions by asking what it identified as the two intelligent questions: ? What is the meaning of my experience? ? What is what really is? The first of these is recognized as the phenomenological question, while the second is known as the ontological question. Since the Metapsychiatric definition of reali