Psychology and psychoanalysis of modern times is not so different from the self exploration work we do with the various Tantric techniques. I would say the difference between them, and not just between tantra and psychology, but between each lineage, psychologist or baba, is their vision of who is the Self.
One of the great failures of modern psychology is how self obsessed it has made us. Everything is a reflection of the Self, but the psychological self is a limited personality within the limited being. In Tantra everything is seen to be a reflection of our Shiva self.
If we look at the astrology chart there is not actually a beginning of an end to it. We can follow the vimshottari backwards or forwards in time forever.
Of course we made the chart using a very specific birth time, But the birth time just provides us with a point of perception. Our birth time and place is just a mathematical point, it’s not more real than Rahu and Ketu. Since everything lined up on your birth date, you’re here, something happened just like something happens when the Sun and Moon line up with the mathematical points we call Rahu and Ketu (an eclipse); a moment when great miracles become possible.
Just try going back to the time and place of your birth. First off, Kali has devoured all of that, right up to this very moment. I hope that I offer some tasty food to the mother with this article.
The psychologist would see this as brain food, but it’s much more than than that: I am eating your time, and your inner Keli is devouring this not as brain food, but as the flavouring on the stream of time. The flavours might trigger the intellect, the emotions, of touch on the sense of self so that you identify with the worlds or the stories provide a mirror into your own Self.
Of course everything is triggered to some degree by everything; this is the flow of energy, of undercurrents. All the impressions of the five senses are eating energy in a different way, everything is an unconscious sign or symbols. Some small bit becomes conscious to folks like us who have spent their lives trying to understand the undercurrents more deeply.
Psychology ends where the individual self ends, tantra, mysticism, metaphysics teaches that we are not the individual self or any of the details; we are much more than that. What we do here in this world is gods work, restarted at the beginning of time and will end at the end of time’s; then he will open his eyes agains and get back to work for another day. A whole life time can be reduced to a days work and the work never ends. Chop chop!!
Our job is go beyond ourselves, to reach for the stars and the gods, to seek out sat chit ananda: truth consciousness bliss. In the search for the self; accept nothing less.
Mahadev