ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses some of the themes that spring from an account of key areas of psychosynthesis theory. In Assagioli's view, these unconscious forces can be recognized and worked with, in the light of both spiritual consciousness and scientific methods and techniques becoming newly available. The book traces the split development of scientific and religious/mystical thinking as it comes to be experienced and perceived in our present society. This is taken back to the relationship of these two modes of knowing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. The book examines the nature of mysticism through twenty centuries, and also examines the particular Western schools. When psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy began to develop in the late nineteenth century, it sprang largely from the scientific tradition and from clinical practice.
