Essay
The Psychological Function of Spiritual Thinking
Where Psychology and Spirituality Intersect
The intersection of psychology and spirituality is both fascinating and fragile. At their core, both are ways of making sense of human experience — attempts to understand the unseen forces shaping how we feel, act, and find meaning. Yet, while psychology seeks grounding in awareness and evidence, spirituality often turns outward, toward symbols, signs, and invisible systems that seem to guide us.
The Psychological Function of Spiritual Thinking
Spiritual frameworks often invite us to see meaning in the events and coincidences of daily life. A random encounter becomes a “sign from the universe,” a delay feels “meant to be,” and our surroundings begin to participate in our inner story. Psychologically, this means we’re assigning power to the external world — to gods, fate, the cosmos, or patterns we believe are communicating with us.
In this sense, spirituality can become psychologically projective: it externalizes inner dynamics. Our own wishes, fears, and intuitions are mirrored back through symbols in the world. The risk, however, is that this can subtly become self-centered — not in a moral sense, but in the sense that everything begins to revolve around me and my meaning.
This is where spirituality can border on narcissism: the assumption that the world’s happenings are always about us. If this interpretive lens becomes rigid or unconscious, it can even resemble the psychological state of ideas of reference — when neutral events seem to contain hidden personal messages. Awareness makes the difference between a spiritual worldview and a delusional one. Without it, what begins as meaning-making can drift toward distortion.
When Spirituality Helps Us Know Ourselves
Yet this same process — seeing meaning in the external — can also be profoundly useful when engaged consciously. The symbols, coincidences, or “messages” we perceive can serve as mirrors that help us articulate what we already know but haven’t yet admitted.
When someone asks the universe for a sign about a decision, the interpretation of that sign usually reveals what they truly wanted all along. The “sign” works as a psychological compass, reflecting back an internal desire or truth that was already there.
Cognitive psychology offers parallels. Priming and confirmation bias describe how we notice and interpret information that aligns with our existing beliefs or longings. Recognition itself depends on familiarity — we only recognize what we already, in some way, know. The Rorschach test works exactly this way: what we see in the inkblot says more about our inner world than about the image itself.
In that sense, spirituality can be understood as an outer projection of inner knowing. It’s not that the universe is sending us messages, but that our mind is constantly seeking coherence between inner and outer worlds — and finds it through the stories we tell.
Spiritual Intelligence: Awareness as the Bridge
There’s another layer to this intersection — one that psychology increasingly recognizes — called spiritual intelligence. This term doesn’t refer to religious belief, but to the ability to use spiritual perspectives in a conscious, emotionally intelligent way.
When we know that we are assigning meaning to events — when we do it deliberately rather than automatically — spirituality can become deeply healing. Saying that something was “meant to be” can, in that sense, be an act of emotional regulation. It softens the edges of pain, helps us release control, and creates a sense of coherence in moments of chaos.
The story itself may not be objectively true, but its psychological function is to bring relief, perspective, and hope. This is the essence of spiritual intelligence: using symbolic or transcendent frameworks with awareness. We’re not surrendering our agency to external forces; we’re using them as creative metaphors to understand and soothe our inner life.
In this way, spirituality becomes not a substitute for psychological understanding, but a companion to it — a poetic framework through which we can process complexity, loss, and uncertainty. Awareness transforms spirituality from projection into integration.
It allows us to hold both truths at once: that meaning exists within us, and that the world around us can help us remember it.