S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 2 9 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos My body is in pain, my breath burning Come and extinguish the fire of separation I spend the nights roving about in tears. – Mīrābāī (1980, 74) The soul finds rest in no one but God. – Meister Eckhart (1986, 336) The man of God realizes that all these desires are the desire for God. – Rūmī (2004, 46) We seek harmony with all creation. – Fools Crow (in Mails 1990, 47) Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, CCMHC, NCC, CPRP, MHRS, is a practicing psychotherapist who has worked for years in the field of mental health and social services. His focus is on comparative religion and the intersection between culture, spirituality, and psychology. His works include Paths That Lead to the Same Summit: An Annotated Guide to World Spirituality, Dismantling Freud: Fake Therapy and the Psychoanalytic Worldview (previously published as Psychology Without Spirit: The Freudian Quandary), and Behaviorism: The Quandary of a Psychology without a Soul. He edited the issue on “Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy” for Studies in Comparative Religion, and his articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines including Sacred Web, Sophia, Parabola, Resurgence, and the Temenos Academy Review. His email contact is samuelbendeck@yahoo.com. 1 Introduction It is striking that in today’s therapeutic culture, the epidemic of addiction has become so commonplace that most people have become desensitized to it; to the degree that its prevalence has been normalized and its deeper dimensions, in large part, remain undiscerned. Life in modernity is out of balance because of its totalizing worldview, which is desacralized and materialistic to an extreme. It appears to be rapidly ravaging societies around the world by inciting endless desires that can never be fulfilled and which are fundamentally destructive to the human condition. It is as if the massive rise in addictions of every sort, now also referred to as substance use disorders, has always been the norm. Although addictions have always existed since the earliest times, the data on the human and social impact of addiction and its devastation across all cultures of the world is alarming. As such, this blight needs to be regarded not only as a public health disaster but, principally, as a spiritual crisis facing all
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