Elena maintains that justice is a spiritual phenomenon and that the 9-11 crisis highlighted a clash of cultures, paradigms, and worldviews.  “Whether we like it or not,” she says, “the reality of globalization is upon us,” challenging individual identities and creating tensions.  “Psychology has the responsibility to look beyond the individual, group, and inter-group perspectives to a historical one.”  She says our world is in a state of “structural transition and intellectual and moral chaos” and that we need “an integrative vision of society and culture,” one that reflects our transformed relations with each other in the modern world.

While Elena is not opposed to deconstruction of ideas and traditions, she also feels that “old mythologies have been debunked,” leading to “intellectual chaos.”  She argues that the fundamentally materialistic social scientific view of reality as form has left us with a bleak and hopeless perspective of humanity.  As an alternative, Elena speaks of the common premise of all wisdom tradition that reality is fundamentally spiritual, and is simply manifested in material forms.

She introduced the main principles of Baha’i spiritual psychology as a further elaboration of earlier spiritual psychologies, for example Buddhist psychology.  She outlined the three central principles of Baha’i psychology: spiritual transcendence (life as emanation of spirit unfolding dynamically and collectively), historical consciousness which expresses the collective unfolding of spirit (qualitative shifts in evolution of collective consciousness), and global unity (interdependence and the need to examine all the political, social, psychological, and moral issues that face us in their global historical context).  She notes the Baha’i elaboration of the Buddhist principle of moment-to-moment interdependent arising, understood as the expression of spirit.  “Absolute reality is not form,” she maintains, “but potentiality.”

Elena believes, therefore, that the horizons of Humanistic Psychology need to expand to include global experience (e.g., the Cambodian experience, the African experience, the East European experience, etc.).  Along with that, we need to cultivate engaged action.  She cites the split between knowing and love and action as a primary problem in contemporary Western academe.  Our thinking is provincial and compartmentalized, thus touching only the periphery of the human condition, maintaining a separatist attitude, lacking a collective understanding, and neglectful of some of the harsh realities of life on the globe.

In regard to justice, Elena argues that “it is a reality, not a conceptual category,” and an improved collective lens is also required for an understanding of it.  For example, she cites the shortcomings of Bush’s notion of an “Axis of Evil” as an example of a limited Western worldview.  “Individual justice is impossible in an interdependent world,” she challenges, “How often do we ‘know’ past our conceptions?”  Elena believes that our need for global justice should be met with global institutions, the product of an organic collective consultative effort.

Furthermore, Elena stresses the importance of “giving Psychology away.”  She shared her own endeavors which, in light of her beliefs, include a professional orientation toward community psychology, with an emphasis on better understanding oppressed cultures and ideals; redefining  psychological health needs in terms of a collective phenomenon with an emphasis on collective spiritual potentiality; and international peace psychology, the reality of cultivating peace as an individual state of mind parallel with working toward creating the collective global institutions to support it.

“While we are caught in philosophical exploration,” Elena says, “reality is happening outside.  We need to talk about our role in these institutions, side by side with individual growth.  We cannot have one without the other.”