In our modern societies it has often become difficult to have success on the path. Stress and unnatural life are only one important hinderance. Most modern people have thrown religious principles away and only live to fulfill their wishes. But they have not learned to analyse their wishes and they do not see that they are slaves of their wishes, and that they have been educated to think that they have won a new freedom through the extended possibilities of consumption.
Culture and technics have become two different things in many fields of life. But most things of modern culture are just old wine in new bottles. The modern cultural values are just as before power, wealth, success and sex in a variety of modern forms, those things which are attractive for the small human ego.
Modern technics is used to make all this possible and to awaken the desires, and therefore our world has become a plundered planet !

Master Sri Aurobindo said : "This planet is mainly a big place of fulfilment of desires".

Psychology and spirituality

Modern science is the consequent effort to create logic-causal coherences between the occurences of the environment and to formulate these with numbers and terms. The problem is the limited human psyche and mind, once regarding the perception, but even regarding the logic and the ability of abstraction. Therefore it has become the aim of psychology to explore the human psyche and to control it. (Further: Wenzlaff/Feder : Die Wirklichkeit des Geistes(PDF,german text)).

Psychology is the scientific answer of materialism on human life and human consiousness, and it arose as a side branch of Philosophy . Modern Psychology tries to deleiver a purely logical and materialistic human model, in which the religious tendencies have an irrational function and are "explained" with modern explanations.
From the sight of modern psychology spirituality is just a fancy, not only because relative few people in the western countries have spiritual experiences.
But the psyche of a psychologist is equally limited as normal human consciousness is , so that this scientific yardstick becomes the problem of generalisation of the scientific observations.
Therefore we find "scientific authorities" who lead the various directions and scools of psychology.

The other problem of psychology is that the patients do not want to built up an "integral soul" but to get rid of their problems and to have success in life without reflection of the false application of their energies in life. Therefore Psychology has a problem with Ethics.
People with spiritual selfrealization have a different view of life and different patterns of behaviour than the adapted citizen. They have inner spiritual culture instead of self-centered outer culture, which is an aspect of vitality und of the human ego.

"The spiritual man is one who has discovered his soul. He has found his self and lives in that, is conscious of it, has the joy of it he needs nothing external for his completeness of existence. (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)
"Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is eternal to the divine consciousnees itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is initiate, it is the very stuff of the soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of the divine being.
The ordinary man depens upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune; none of these things can effect thew divine soul."
(Sri Aurobindo : Essays on the Gita, Page175)

Many psychologists try to supress people on the path as schizophrenic , often because of the false understanding of the higher spiritual EGO. In some countries they have lost a part of their legal influence, but very often first judicially.
Psychology can become a kind of modern inquisition, if in the false hands, and in modern societys it has reached this position. To be "social" means to be like the others (in psychological terms) - and not to help or support each other. (In the USA social can have the meaning of communism).
If You think very different or live very different than the majority of people then You are probably sick or psychotic - or at least neurotic !

Meditation is just self-hypnosis (like NLP) with illusions for these people, and psychology has various models of man (because they dont really know !). The scool of C.G. Jung is a bit different but he still sees his "archetypes" as a kind of psychic symbolism.
The Sabda is at the most a kind of Tinnitus from the sight of psychology.
(A hinht :It is sufficient if these people beleive in their plausible models, and please dont try to argue with them, they can explain everything without a real proof in the individual cases.)

Since several years psychology shows interest in meditation and similar techniques. Chemical treatments(which belong to the neurologic section) have proved to have negative effects on the nervous system (Valium etc.) and the results of the therapies are very often disappointing.
The methods of autosuggestion, NLP, hypnosis and autogenous training have shown limited results. Therefore it has been tried to use the methods of meditation for treatment.
The electrical alpha-waves during meditation and relaxation and the chemical changes in the human body caused by these methods were measured, which in fact exist and which have already been published before(St.Palos : Breath and meditation ; E.Taylor-M.Murphy-St.Donovan: The physical and psychological Effects of meditation). But the chemical changes cannot simply be used to reach higher states of consciesness through injection of those chemicals.

Further all this does not mean that psychology accepts the religious systems around these methods. It is just the attempt to use these methods as a means of treatment of patients , and of course these methods get a modern description.
If it would be possible to bring down the spiritual energies as a means of treatment just to heal people who are completely against spirituality then this would be a modern branch of the black path.
The "Transcendental meditation"- movement is an example for such an attempt of abusing spiritual energies for daily success, and this movement publishes chemical and electrical measurements (though probably many of them are just self produced and false).

People on the spiritual path have a different view of life than the average man :
"The spiritual man has detected his soul. He is conscious of that and he enjoys of that. He has found his true self und he lives within this self. He needs no outer things for the fullness of his existence",(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)

Spiritual aberrations

Many people and some Yogins (in Nepal etc.) take drugs to have "spiritual" experiences : The real soul is supressed or undeveloped, and drugs offer a way out of the common life, a bit similar to alcohol !
But drugs are not a kind of spiritual experience. Drugs sometimes open a small door to the negative worlds with the price of destruction of the body.
Even "spiritual" Sex (abused in "left tantra" or similar techniques) is a way to sink into the unconscious and negative forces ! The lowest point in the taoistic "Small cycle" is named "gate of death". Such methodes are only for people of the first initiation (if at all), but these negative forces are transformed then !
Modern psychology has opened the door to these forces, and people now have no inhibition to live with their vitality. Sex education in the sense of reconaissance maybe useful but serves today as a means of living with desires in a clean way.

The other main problem is that psychology has won a big influence on the leading people, and in the United States many of these leading people regularly visit their "soul doctor" So they stand under the influence of these "scientific" trainees who are used to guarantee their success.
One of the results was the american definition of "team-work" instead of "to work in a work-team". It has its old basis in the animal-kingdom where the bull leads his herd and controls it completely, a group which follows the Herd impulse. Animals who are different or do not surrender have no chance in the animal kingdom or have to leave the herd.
Another problem is that animals have neither a mental body nor a mental mind nor a mental intellect or a mental ego, and therefore they cannot generally be compared to human society.
This developement is a danger for freedom and democracy (as far as both really exist). It supresses individual personal developement and so supresses spiritual developement too. Nowadays this aspect of the "american way of life " spreads all over the world - especially in the management of firms. The american society is a good example for a modern and unsocial society where success counts.

"It is false to demand that the individual has to surrender to the community or to melt with it. A community can only develop through the most progressive individuals, and those individuals can only make progress if they are really free. But it is true the the individual finds his unity with the community and with the universe the more it is spiritually progressed", (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,28)

"In the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there will be a close and complete consciousness of the self of the others, a consciousness of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if they were one's own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface of love and sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual consciousness, this intimate oneness",(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,28)

INTROSPECTION

Psychology tries to explain the psychic problems from an intellectual standpoint, and therefore its has developed a very complex system. From the esoteric standpoint a Psychoanalys with the revival of old things of the past of the individual patient (by remembrance) should be avoided. It very often leads to a long crisis of the patient anyway. Introspection combined with inner exercises brings higher and better and deeper results, but the aspiration must be very different.
Modern pyschology teaches people that they should love themselves, but the self-love is one of the roots of the black path. It is taught to establish the small untamed personal ego.
"The gnostic beeing starting from this new basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of knowledge and a realised power of being."
"As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the developement of its own force and for mastery by force; its quest is for growth, power, conquest, posession, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant self-expression, developement, diverse manifoldness of action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow posession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiement." (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)

So psychology is a science about the small human ego and the forces which are controlled consciously and unconsciously through the ego and control the ego because they are its substance. But psychology has only terms for the description of the unconscious forces. It does not anticipate of the abysses of human consciousness.
In contradiction the goal of spirituality is the complete spiritual transformation of body and soul.

Finally a quotation of master Sri Aurobindo who said: "Psychology is only the exorbitant generalization of some small truthes."
To know these small truthes of psychology can of course somtimes be quite useful together with introspection if put into a proper order, just like any special knowledge can sometimes be useful. (For further study : Ch. N. Norbu : Buddhism and Psychology, Shang Shung Edition)

"An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transformation of our world-consciousness and world-action : for it takes up into the new power of awareness not only the inner existence but our outer being and our world-beeing."(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)
"For the law of the body arises from the subconsient or inconscient; but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy respones, will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence", (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)

At the latest on step 18 of the Universal Path the adept has transformed the unconscious energies of his material body so far that he needs no more sleep, instead only two hours of rest of the body - as a forrunner of extensive changes.

"In our soul exists a thirst for perfection; but not for this human perfection, which is a perfection of the EGO and which blocks the path of the divine perfection, but it is that kind of perfection, which has the power to reveal eternal truthes on earth." (The Mother, Aurobindo)