Re: Spiritual Assessement

Mary,

I apologize for taking so long to respond to your question, but it took me a while to find something that might fit your needs. Although this material does not technically provide a spiritual assessment tool, it may be of some value.

The following passages are from an unpublished manuscript, Principles of Individual Psychology, by Alexander Mueller.

(Quoting Mueller)

.....Here we must emphasize a primary function of the human consciousness. The consciousness entails the ability to reflect, to question, and to search for answers. Man is not only capable of thinking, but he also has the need to ask questions and to seek answers to how he can master a given situation, and then conduct himself under certain conditions.

When faced by things, creatures, or a situation, man above all will ask the question: how and what is that? This is only the beginning of questions. The correct questioning is a process that can be suppressed, but there is a tendency to take the following steps:

What and how is that?

Does it have to be so?

Can it be otherwise?

Should it be otherwise?

How should it be?

What can I do?

Beginning with the second, every following question contains something special. Man is capable of not accepting facts, the world as it is. He can test the possible or the necessity to change the given situation, that is, he can look at the given as a challenge. To question oneself and given circumstances and to want to make changes is a characteristic of the human being.

The ways and means by which a person lives his life is key to whether his search for its essence is self-centered, or for mainly an intellectual discourse with the world and with himself.

In responding to the question: "How should it be?" he makes a significant decision. His response can be: the world should be fashioned so that we can live in it well; or: the world should be, and become, as it should be. The second response expresses something significantly new. The world is not only for me, for us, but also for itself. All living matter have not only meaning relative to us, they have within them a sense and purpose for their existence. It should become as it should be. With that response I can still mean my wellbeing, but also that of the world as well. In the latter, the assumption is included that the world originally had meaning and served not only human purposes.

The world is unfinished and incomplete. It is for man to continue to shape and complete it. How it is to be formed, and what is to become of it is something man himself has to find out while constantly in danger of going astray. He can always approach more closely the deeper purpose of the world, or he can spoil it. Man can ask the questions that have been presented of the world, of other forms of life, of his own situation and of events; he can ask them with reference to himself. .....

For more information about Mueller, visit our web site at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hstein/ and follow the "Biograhies" link, then follow the "Readings" link to the "Philosophy and Theology" section.

Dr. Stein

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