Exploring eighteen fundamental principles to living the Spiritual Life

Dear Serge. I am starting out on my spiritual path. But I am finding it difficult. I have a demanding job that takes a lot of my energy and doesn’t allow me to take time off and visit ashrams or go to spiritual retreats or workshops. I also feel more attracted to spirituality as a whole as opposed to any particular religious tradition. There are so many questions I need to ask, but I don’t know where to go for support and guidance.

Can you advise me please? PAUL

SERGE.  As a matter of fact, Paul, I can, as I have been teaching a ‘Do-it-at-Home Spiritual Training Program’ for people exactly like yourself, where you may embark on your Sacred Path, without  ever needing to leave your armchair! How it works is that we talk together twice a month ( or once a fortnight), and more if you wish, for an hour on  ‘SKYPE’, during which time we explore all the issues pertaining to your quest, and we work with whatever material you wish to bring up. After each session, I will give you particular ‘homework’ to do.

For example, I may suggest you practice a particular kind of meditation, study a certain sacred text from a particular tradition, or  read more poetry, listen to certain pieces of sacred music, practice going about your day from a space of loving kindness, or write a short essay, etc!  In this way, you will be given a spiritual direction and be increasingly supported to take ever greater responsibility for your own unfolding. We will also have an e-mailing relationship and you may email me questions which I will do my best to answer.

Please note, Paul, that the Spirituality that I embrace, centers around recognizing the importance of the following eighteen points. If interested, it is important you read them carefully to see if what I offer, corresponds to what you feel you need. Here are my points:

1. There are many paths to God and each of us, according to our culture and soul inclination, needs to find a way that works for us.
2. We may discover our Spirituality without necessarily being a member of any particular Religion.
3. Divinity is both transcendent and immanent, and thus exists both beyond all things, while at the same time is present within all things.
4. If we wish to grow our Spirituality, it requires dedication, discipline, sincerity and the willingness to ‘work on ourselves’ in different ways and at different levels, as according to the kinds of issues and challenges we may face at any particular time.
5. While becoming more Spiritual may  initially start off with the need to use Spirituality to ‘feel better’ about ourselves - that is, to prop up our wounded egos - the deeper aim is ultimately to  go beyond our egos and enter more into  trans-egoic (beyond ego) states of being! This deeper aim will only be put into practice much later, when we are ready for it.
6. This does not mean, however, that we need to deny or seek to transcend our ‘personal egoic self’ – that is, the us that wants to be successful, do well, be liked, etc. Rather, the name of the approach I advocate is an integrative one - about our trying to ‘bring down’ a higher energy into our personal self, so that more and more, this aspect of ourselves will be ‘lifted up’.  Thus,  our ‘personal us’  is continually being moved in the direction of wishing  only to do that which is aligned to what our  higher  or ‘Impersonal’ Self desires. Put another way, we all have two main ‘us-es’ (the personal and the impersonal) and the name of the game is for them both to merge and support each other. Just as the Impersonal us must not be used to drown out our personal needs, so similarly, our egoic self must not hijack our spirituality and try to use  sacred energy to serve its own ‘seperative/egoic agendas’!
7. Spiritual work will always include psychological work. (For example, if we are angry with, and have ‘unfinished business’ with, our own personal father, it will most probably affect how we see and relate to, our idea of God, and therefore, if we are to come closer to the divine, it may require working at healing our relationship with our personal father!)
8. The aim of being spiritual is not to feel high but to be free.  Therefore, going through periods of ‘feeling unhappy’ may not necessarily mean we are off track.
9. Spirituality also has its dark face and if we are sincerely on our path, we need to be willing, at times, to confront that dark face, if it chooses to erupt into our lives in some particular form or other!
10. Becoming more Spiritual and being more fully human, are to be seen as one and the same thing. Therefore, if we wish for some yardstick to try to ‘measure’ our Spiritual growth, it will be by how human we are becoming. I regard it as much more  important that we be able to act wisely, be courageous  or relate kindly to difficult people and be  able to open our hearts to our world, than, say, achieve  some fantastic yogic posture, develop some ‘great psychic ability’  or quote some long sacred text by heart!
11. It is important that we discover an appropriate code of Ethics for ourselves, and do our best to live by that code. (e.g. Buddha’s Noble Way or the Ten Commandments, etc).
12. It is important that we honor the pace we are going and neither try to run before we can walk - that is, not try to embrace states of consciousness we are not yet ready for ( a practice known as ‘spiritual by-passing’)- nor remain overlong at levels that we are now ready to transcend and leave behind.
13. Being Spiritual today is no longer, as in the past, a solitary activity.  As we enter the 21st century, we are entering collective states of consciousness, which means that as a species, we are seeking to ‘evolve together’. As part of the larger whole, therefore, each of us are challenged to embrace that ‘I’ within us that is slowly becoming a ‘We’!
14. Our personal development, therefore, needs to be aligned to human-collective and world need. Our Spirituality will open up for us much more quickly as we attempt to live more and more as the solution to the problems of our world (as opposed to still being part of those problems.)
15. It is therefore important that we seek to ‘make a difference’, and so practice difference-making as best we can. We do not need to wait until we are perfect before being able to be of assistance to our planet. Each of us has his or her unique ‘Service Work’ to do, in those particular areas of life which our souls have drawn us to concern ourselves with.
16. There are two forms of Spiritual Practice that always need practicing, both of which are equally important. The first is engaging in practices (e.g., meditation, yoga) which are not of themselves ‘Spiritual’, but which are designed to put us in states conducive to our spiritual self opening up.  The second is practicing expressing the fruits of that work, by seeking to relate to ourselves, our fellow human beings, our society and our planet, in increasingly conscious, loving, kind, supportive and intelligent ways.
17. The great challenge for each of us is to walk our talk and discover a way of living conducive to allowing what is truest and best about us to surface. There is a strong link between our living ‘holistically’ and being Spiritual. Our spirituality needs to be well anchored in the world and not only may we not need to abandon our everyday work in order to grow our soul life, but it may be a powerful medium through which it emerges. (For example, if all the good financial advisors went to live in the Himalayas, it would mean the world of finance would remain solely in the hands of the sharks!)
18. Thus, the fabric of our everyday daily life, with all its many difficulties and challenges (paying the mortgage, dealing with problematic relationships, etc) is the medium for our spiritual development.  Put simply, most of us need to find ourselves, not by abandoning our world, but by trying to live in it as gracefully and as abundantly as we can.  We cannot be effectively spiritual unless we are well embodied in life. The art is to discover how to ‘Be in the world but not of it.’

If these eighteen points mean something to you, this program may be useful to you. For all further details, see my Spiritual Training Course.  If not, good luck, Paul.

WHAT TO DO WHEN MEDITATION DOESN'T SEEM TO WORK FOR US

Question: 'I find my thoughts are forever leading me this way and that. I have tried a number of Buddhist practices to try and calm my mind, but none of them seem to work for me. Do you have any suggestions as I often give myself headaches and insomnia with these never ending trains of thought.'

Serge. It is often difficult to answer a question , without having more data about a person . So all I can go by is the  specific things you say: firstly, that no practices seem to work for you, and secondly, that your mind is so 'monkey-fied' (  Buddhists  describe our restless mind as 'monkey mind'  as it is always jumping all over the place) that you get stressed to the point of not sleeping! So OK, here is my response.

Often we blame methods or are critical towards spiritual practices, either because we don't do them properly or  we are not ready for them and so cannot do them, or conversely, we don't get instructed properly. (My first yoga teacher was terrible and so I felt I could never do yoga!) Also,  meditation is not for all of us.  In addition, we feel that  spiritual practices ought to be easy and that we should 'get it' at once. Practices aren't like that.  They need a lot of discipline and a lot of determination. And Meditation is not easy.  Not if we want to learn to do it properly. Our ego self that is so attached to keeping us  restless  -  as it won't have the same control over us if we  start to quieten down - will do anything to try to stop us doing things to  help us become more peaceful. In fact ,our whole dysfunctional system of  power politics, big business,  large multi-national  drug companies -  all that corruption -  it all survives through our minds remaining unquiet.  

Unquiet minds lead to war and  the system needs war to sell  its weapons and  so not go bankrupt. ( Isn't that insane?  Our planet holds itself together by producing the very things that will blast it apart!) In a nutshell, unquiet minds lead to  all our  many dysfunctional behaviours that so many of us are so addicted to.  Indeed, we swim in this drama every day and because it constitutes such a large part of our reality, we often think there is nothing else. My point is that there are all sorts of forces  out there in the world, geared to making us  remain in higgledy piggledy  states and not  be moved to do anything to try to  move beyond them.

So these could be some of the reasons why  Buddhist practices may not  work for you.  The fault is  certainly not with the practice. They have been passed down through many traditions, and if we can do them and are ready and able to do them, they  certainly work.  It also greatly helps if we find ourselves a good teacher. Have you  done that ? And do  you persevere? Are you committed? Do you put as much energy and attention into your inner work as to your outer work? These are all questions to ask yourself.

The other question that is important, is to inquire if you are ready for meditation? Not everyone is.  Not necessarily because one is not evolved enough, but  because one may be carrying a lot of emotional junk that needs clearing out first of all. Put simply, Meditation is not a panacea for all of our discontents.   Nor is it a substitute for psychotherapy.  It may help bring up  hidden emotions from the depths of our unconscious, but it may not  necessarily help us to heal them. So if, say, we are  still very angry with our parents;  if we will have been traumatised in some way,  or if we have certain kinds of personality disorders,  any of these things  can make us feel  very disconbobulated and resistant to meditation . Indeed, it may not be what we need in order to feel more peaceful.

The East and the West represent two different approaches to healing and self development.  In the East , we learn to heal ourselves through expanding our awareness and developing  greater insight into what is. This is the way of Meditation.  In the West,  on the other hand,  our focus is more on the power of investigating.  So if  something is  making us feel  very anxious, it may be that we will initially need to  adopt a Western approach and explore what is going on with us emotionally, and 'go into' the painful feelings, and in this way try to release them. Many of us are not yet ready for  deep, insightful, meditative work  until we have completed quite a lot of investigative work first. 

And perhaps this is what you need. I would be happy if you wanted to ring me and we might talk this issue over. I am now doing a lot of sessions with people using SKYPE and we could do a session that could help you see what your real issue is. I think that if  we can see our issues clearly, then we are much better placed to handle them.  One of the arts of being on a spiritual path is   being able to stand back and observe ourselves and so sense what is right for us at any time or what  it is we  really need. 

Often, what may be helpful at one stage of our development, can be counter productive when we move into a new phase.  So it just may be that  Buddhist Meditation is not what you need at this moment and may be exactly what you need later, when you will have  first investigated what it is that seems to be blocking your ability to feel  emotionally at peace.


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THE POPE HAS JUST VISITED THE U.K. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF HIM AND DO YOU THINK THE CRITICISM AGAINST HIM IS JUSTIFIED?

Question. Serge, I am interested in what you think about the Pope. I confess that I was surprisingly touched by him when he visited England on his tour. Do you think he is a ‘good man’ or do you think all the criticism against him is justified?

Serge.  I am glad you were touched. I was too.  I felt he had a lot of heart and warmth and gave us all a great gift, even if we were not Catholics. I think there are two separate issues here: the Pope as a human being and the organisation  over which he presides. I am sure that,  as a human being, he holds great spiritual power. One does not get to be Pope without it. Certainly, on the news,  I saw the anti-Pope brigade led by that  angry, arch God hater, Richard Dawkins, who described him as ‘A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds’, and observed the tight-lipped, mean-hearted expression on Dawkins’ face, it said more about him than about the Pope!

(What we human beings don’t yet seem to have mastered, is the art of pointing out anomalies or faults without a lot of  self-righteous bile going into our accusations! Why is it  that so often we  have to be nasty and aggressive when we draw attention to things that we believe are wrong, and in so doing, personify the very anomalies we complain about!)

But to answer your question, my answer is no; I do not think  all the criticism against the Pope as a man is justified. That said,  there is an enormous lot wrong with the institution and  with the structures of the Catholic church, over  which he presides – and here I distinguish between these structures and the essence of Catholic spirituality which is beautiful and pure, and  which has helped and touched millions of people all over the world.  There is a little story that I think is relevant here. A man was walking down the street full of joy. The devil was sitting on a bench and saw him and went up to him and said’ My friend, you look so happy. What has happened to make you like that? ‘Ah,’ beamed the man, ‘I feel so great as I have just discovered a wonderful truth.’ At this the devil pricked up his ears and drawing closer to the man, put an arm around his shoulders,  and said, ‘I am so pleased. Do let me help you organise it!’

And by devil, I refer, of course, to man’s wounded ego! As an ‘organization’, then,  the Catholic church is not dissimilar to  other powerful corporations and is facing  not dissimilar challenges. As the Pope is its head honcho,  as with the leaders of BP and Goldman Sachs, who have also recently and justifiably,  had to take a lot of flak, he feels honour bound to ‘defend  his baby’! Where his limitations  have  surfaced is that this has involved a lot of cover ups, especially of the many abuse scandals that have occurred.  I think the problem with the Pope is that while he is a good man, he is also an old man; he is steeped in the past, reared in a tradition of patriarchy and celibacy and seems afraid of letting it all go.  He cannot look to the future,  and, so it seems, realise, as so many heads of organisations are  now doing, that if their organisations are  to survive,  they need to make many  radical changes and pretty quickly! That’s part of the problem of strong traditions. Yes, because they have existed for eons, they give us strength. However,  their downside is that they can weigh us down and so prevent us moving forward into the future (see my article ‘Why we need spirituality and not religion in the world’ on my website www.sergebb.com).

 So what is ‘wrong’ with the institution of the Catholic church? A lot. Firstly, it preaches the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’, namely that we are born in damnation, which is a terrible burden to hold. Father Mathew Fox,  who, borrowing from the tradition of Creation Spirituality, suggested we think rather in terms of ‘Original Blessing’, was  condemned to silence by the church for being ‘out of line!’ Thus, while it will not admit it openly, a lot of Catholicism is pretty anti joy!  Apollonius is OK., Dionysius is equated with the devil, leading to a state whereby one is encouraged to study about God, rather than directly know  and celebrate the divine. In addition, homosexuality is seen as evil, yet  only men are allowed to be priests (women aren’t ‘good enough ‘ to make the grade!), and, in addition, are required to be celibate, yet so far as I know, are given no processes by which to transmute their sexual energies other than  through prayer. This leads to strong repression and, for many, great unhappiness, leading inevitably to a climate conducive to sexual abuse . (If our sexuality is abused, then that abuse gets ‘acted out’!) And then, of course, there is the horrific element whereby Birth Control is banned, thus leading to a condition in which too many children are born for the planet’s resources to be able to handle.

Basically, in common with BP and Goldman Sachs and many other  large corporations,  the Catholic church is guilty of the ‘sin’ - and I will use that  word since it is one it likes to use - of denying what Jung called its Shadow, and instead projecting its own dark side out onto others. Thus the church is split between light and dark. And that’s where  many of its problem lie.  Only now is it being willing to recognise the mote in its  own eye, and, given the secrete ness of his organisation, I think the Pope is to be congratulated for at last starting, if tentatively, to own up to its abusive nature and the fact that the church had focussed more on protecting its rogue priests than caring for their victims.

Today, much new  spiritual light is flooding into our planet and is shining directly into all our ‘darknesses’ - into everything that is hidden and unjust -  and the result is that more and more of what we have tried to ‘cover up’, whether directly or indirectly, is coming out into the open. We see this happening  as much in our own personal lives as in the lives of  our organisations and institutes and nations.  And this is very healthy and to be celebrated, for only when we can see a blockage or an anomaly for what it is, can we find a way of dealing with it.  Just as many of the wrong doings of the banking system have been exposed, and, we hope, will lead to fairer  financial practices in the future, so I hope and pray the same thing will happen with the Catholic church, as it is a huge force for good in the world. If  Catholic Christianity can  once more find it true heart  and soul – its true Christhood, as it starts liberating itself from the  worst restrictions of  the ‘Churchianity’  into which it been descending - then the  true message of Jesus will be liberated once more  to burn brightly on our planet. And our planet needs this badly.  The Catholic church has a lot of work to do on itself over the next few years .

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Spirituality that Translates and Spirituality that Transforms

Question. I always get a little bit confused, as spirituality seems to comprise so many different things that often seem very conflicting. For example, a lot of teachings tell one that if we wish to be  truly spiritual, we  will need totally to transcend our ego, whereas a lot of other teachings seem to be about trying to help us feel happier in our ‘separate self’ state. Could you please tell me what you think?

Serge. I would be delighted to try. First, what you say is very true, only I do not see a conflict. Rather I see that the issue is one of different levels of spiritual teachings. We need to proceed step by step. We  need to understand that at root, the spiritual journey is one of our learning to embrace self at ever higher levels of awareness. Most of us come in to the world needing to evolve an ego self, that is, an identity where we experience ourselves as being separate from our world, and for most of us, it takes a very long time to be able to free ourselves from that role.  Indeed, very, very few of us, actually, are at a level where we are able or ready , to begin to discard our ego and to enter  into what the Master Adi Da called the truly radical life!


Put simply, we need to have a secure foundation inside us – an effectively functioning ego, a healthy emotional life - before we are capable or strong enough to begin  contemplating journeying into the void or embracing the  true emptiness.    In Ram Dass’s words’ We need to become a somebody before we are ready to become a nobody’, that is, we need to have established a strong enough separate self identity - even if it is not yet our authentic self, even if it is still based on images we have of ourselves - before we are ready to let  it go  and consider blending with a self that belongs to all of life!


And even then, we may not wish to, or be able to. I must stress that it can be dangerous to ‘let go’ prematurely, (and many of the difficult acid trips I experienced around me in the 60’s, were about hippies taking too strong a dose and being temporarily precipitated into states of  egoless being which in no way were they prepared for).  I say this because  the experience of deep spirituality can be very, very shattering. It is all about the total dissolution of that ‘safe world’ that  most of us believe is the only world and depend upon. And it is not  at all comfortable! (See my long article on ‘The Spiritual Path  as Tough Journey’ ).


Ken Wilbur is very clear on  all this. In his journal ‘One Taste’, he  talks of two kinds of spirituality; spirituality that translates and spirituality that transforms. The former is focussed on consoling the separate self, fortifying it, defending it, promoting it. ‘With translation, the self is given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief – perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, forgiveness instead of blame. The self then learns to translate its world and its being in the terms of this new language or new paradigm and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate the terror in the heart of the separate self….


But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, undermined and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or subject) is given a new way to think about the world; but with radical transformation, the self is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by the throat and literally throttled to death….The self is not made content; the(old) self is made toast!’


Wilbur argues that both of these functions are incredibly important and altogether indispensable. He suggests that translation itself is an absolute necessity and crucial for most of  us for most of our lives and that if we cannot ‘translate adequately’, we can fall into severe neurosis or even psychosis where the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble.  In his words, ‘This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence but disaster.’


As I said, only a very few of us are ready to ‘go for’ the higher or deeper spirituality and to leap into the  egoless unity.  We know we are ready  for something deeper only when we become fed up with, and feel like discarding,  translative   spirituality’ with its emphasis on helping us ‘feel better’, be ‘more powerful’, live ‘more causally’,  have ‘more meaning’, be  more the ‘master of our own destiny’, etc.  Much of what we loosely call ‘New Age Spirituality’ falls into this category. The truth is, though, that most of us still need this translative spirituality. 

It is the spirituality that is primarily advocated in this magazine. Translative spirituality helps a lot of us in many important ways and assists us make the shift from being part of the problems in the world to being part of the solution. So, to emphasise my point again, just as developmentally, we are not ready to run before we can walk or  can engage in geometry before we have  properly learned to count, so most of us are not ready to submit ourselves to the shattering process that a genuine  transformative spirituality offers us. While we may like to talk about  transformation or about the joys of not being so ego-centred,  in reality, many of us are not yet ready to die to our old identifications and truly to allow ourselves to be reborn.  So I think we need  equally to honour those spiritualities that  help  us cater for our separate self as well as  those that help us shatter it.

How can having a stroke be a spiritual opportunity?

Question: 'In January, I had a major stroke that left me with significant brain damage and the loss of the use of my left side. With intensive physiotherapy, I am beginning to regain some use of my left leg. However, with all the time I have on my hands, I've been doing a lot of self reflection and can't help feeling something is missing. But I can't articulate what. Given that a lot of focus has been on my physical recovery, I suspect what is missing is a spiritual recovery.

But how? I don't even know what it means to be spiritual. How do you know when you have achieved a good spiritual state? Paul

Serge: Thank you, Paul, for your profound question. The first thing I want to say is that I believe all crises have a spiritual meaning or are initiations of one kind or another for us, wherebye something seems to be removed from us at one level , or we lose something - in your case, the feeling in your left side - in order to make  space for something new, at another level, to emerge in its place. And certainly,  this seems to be happening for you.

You say that  you feel something is missing from your life and that you sense it is spirituality. Well, I see this as  a sign that that your spirituality is  actually starting to emerge or grow inside you. For how do we know that something is absent if we have no sense of  what that thing is? Reply: we don't! If there was no spirituality in your life, you would not have any sense that this ingredient was missing. What the message seems to saying is that  now is the time for you to focus on  developing this aspect of your life, as you  now have the space to do so.

A teacher of mine, Ram Dass,  experienced a similar initiation. It is beautifully documented in a DVD entitled Fierce Grace, which I suggest you buy as I think it will be very insightful for you. Basically, Ram Dass' life was going well. He was successful and popular and making a lot of money. And then  he had a stroke, which incapacitated him. Initially, he saw it as an enemy. Why has this happened to me, he moaned, my life was going so well? It took him some months to accept that at a deeper level, what had occurred was a gift from God to help quieten him. (It is only when we are truly peaceful that the divine can really 'enter us'!)

As this realisation  began to dawn , he started talking in terms of being 'Stroked by the divine'  and   came to see that he was being taken to a whole new level in his life, and that his so-called curse was really  a blessing, albeit a fierce one! It also gave those who loved him the chance to support him ( a spiritual act) and for him, who had always been rigorously self sufficient, to accept help ( another spiritual act!)

You ask, Paul, what it means to be spiritual and how we know when we have achieved a good spiritual state? I will  answer the second question first. My reply is  that we don't always know. Many spiritual teachers talk about how, when we feel most lost and destitute, we may in fact be closer to God than when everything is humming in our lives.

How is this?  It is because when we are in that state, our ego or personality self may be less prominent, and so we are more humble. In other words, it is when we are less ego bound-  or when our egos are not running our lives so prominently -  that we are much more of a space to  be open to God. And how open we are at any time, determines our spiritual state.

I am not here implying that the only way to be spiritual is to go through a crisis and experience loss, as this is certainly not the case. But it is  certainly one way.  And at this moment, it seems to be the particular  spiritual journey that your soul is taking you on. Certainly, many people in dire stress have spoken of how, when they were at their wits end, and nothing was working for them,  they would find themselves crying out  for help to God, or to that divine part of themselves,  and would  experience receiving some kind of reply .

For me, being spiritual and being truly human are the same thing.  Not all religious scholars and priests are necessarily  always spiritual  people, and  similarily, many people who do not think much about spirituality, may be full of sweetness and light and so be very spiritual! Sometimes, as in Ram Dass' case and now, it seems, in yours, grace, or the connection with the divine, can be fierce.

I have just gone through a 'baptism by fire' period myself, so I understand this only too well. I guess one definition of spirituality is the willingness to accept  ( that is, not resist) and to work with, whatever way the divine chooses to throw in our path at any time. So Paul, use this time as an opportunity to come to know yourself better.

What did Jesus say: 'Be still, and know that I am God.' Here is your opportunity to come into this same realisation yourself.

Do we have to give up our material work in order to be spiritual?

Question:
‘Hello Serge. I am just starting out on my spiritual journey but I haven’t yet found something that works for me, that honours what is true for me as a human being. Perhaps, to do so, I need to give up the work I am currently doing. I am not sure. Can you advise me?

Serge
I think that very few of us find our true ‘soul path’ or a path that honours our heart ( I see both as the same thing) to start off with. It may take time and often it emerges as a result of our discovering what does or does not work for us or what is true or not true for us. What can be important at the start is that we find something that gives us some kind of initial entrée into the world of soul. It may not be our true path but it can act as a starter and get us going.

For example, in my case, after I left university and felt a spiritual calling, I had a friend who was a student of yoga and who brought me into her world. I practiced Kriya Yoga. This subsequently turned out not to be my way, but doing this yoga brought about certain temporary openings, which in turn gave me a wider panorama into the spiritual world as a whole, and from that I gradually discovered what worked for me.

It may be that your path will be very specific, that is, that you alight, say, upon Buddhism or Sufism early on, or you meet a particular Shaman, whom you feel drawn to, and, hey presto, the rest of your spiritual life is mapped out for you. Or it may be, as is the case with more and more people today, that your way is to be more eclectic and that you feel attracted by many different paths or approaches to the sacred. That has certainly been my way, and it has both its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages of being eclectic is that it makes for a certain freedom of spirit - you are not tied down by a particular tradition which can sometimes be limiting ( a lot of traditions. I think, look back too much into the past and not sufficiently forward into the future) . Also, you can ‘find something’ that corresponds to what you feel you need in your life at any time.

You can do ‘your thing’ in ‘your own time’. The disadvantages of this is that you risk delving superficially into a lot of things and not deeply into any one thing, mistaking, say, quantity of gurus visited for quality of wisdom derived from them. The eclectic way, therefore, requires a lot of discernment and inner discipline. Sometimes it can be tough. One can feel lonely. Where do I go now? What do I need? Here, we are challenged to be both our own teacher and student ; we need to evaluate our requirements and also try to assess our progress!

So if the latter is your way, and I suspect, from what you say, that it might be, then your key guide will be your heart, for it is only in our hearts that we can access the wisdom to tell us what we need at any time. This is why so many teachers tell us to follow our hearts. They really are our best friend as inside them lie many awesome capacities such as tenderness, kindness, love, compassion, courage, the ability to be peaceful, feel awe, see beauty and experience joy, in short, to honour and respect all of life.

The more we learn to live with heart, the more quality we have in our lives, the less we feel separate from ourselves and our world. With heart, we can let others in more deeply and reach out towards them more tenderly. Our capacity to heal ourselves, for example, or to transform indifference into love, or anxiety into compassionate concern, lies in our hearts.

It is only in their transforming fire that our conflicts can be reconciled and we can learn to metabolise our pain and gobble up our shadow side. Through attuning to the essence contained within them, we come more and more into the presence of our true nature.And this for me is what ‘being spiritual’ is all about.

However, just because heart contains all these riches, is no indication that we know how to open to them and so embody them at any depth. That may take time and is essentially ‘the work’. Thus your task is to find a way that works for you to support you opening your heart to yourself and to life, learning not to judge yourself or others, for it is so much through kindness and self-acceptance that we grow and evolve. As such, the more you allow you to be you, the more you tread a path of heart. Put another way, finding that mysterious ‘path of heart’ is not ‘out there’ but within you right now.

Anything and everything that you come across, be it painful or joyful, constricting or expanding, and that you learn to relate to with your heart , will take your deeper into your spirituality. This in turn will bring you closer to yourself. As David Spangler, who used to be the mouthpiece for the Findhorn community, once put it: ‘ We must learn to sprout where we are planted.’

It may be that there is no need for you to go to the Himalayas or give up your job as a Bank manager (or whatever you do) to find your calling.

To be Spiritual, do we need to make an effort or let go 'efforting'?

Dear Serge, I am on my spiritual journey and one of the things that mystifies me is why some teachers advocate the need for us to make a lot of effort if we want to get anywhere, while others tell us to give up all our ‘efforting’, saying it comes from our ego, and will get us nowhere. So what do I do? How can I get anywhere spiritually if I don’t put any effort in? I am confused.
Please advise me.

Serge
I sympathise very much with your dilemma. And I think you have touched on something very important. At one time in my life, I studied with a teacher who advocated both approaches. To some of his students he would say ‘Put more effort in’, to others he would suggest they give up trying so hard. Initially, I found this confusing, until eventually I got to see that different kinds of inner work seem to be required of us at different times, depending on a) what kind of person we are, b) what kind of path we are on (is our journey more ‘outer’- more about ‘ action in the world’ - or more ‘inner’ and mystical), and c) where we are on it at any time.

Do you remember Nina Simone ‘s song about everything having its season? Well, that is very pertinent to the spiritual life. I think the whole art is about our knowing what is most appropriate for us at any particular time. Put simply, sometimes we really need to try very hard and make a big effort. (For example: studying sacred texts so we understand them, disciplining ourselves to meditate when we’d prefer to watch T.V., really working at being more objective, really making sure we relate kindly to others when we don’t feel like it, etc). All this takes conscious effort and intention and I think is very necessary.

Sometimes, however, our spiritual work needs to be about stopping this kind of effort and simply allowing ourselves to ‘Be’ more, letting ourselves be more receptive . This is in order that we may take in or absorb what our earlier efforts may have evoked for us.

Basically, I think that if we are first starting out on our spiritual journey, a lot of doing and ‘efforting’ on our part is necessary, no matter what path we are on or whether we are more mystically or more pragmatically inclined. The same holds true, I think, for anything new that we are trying to get off the ground. Without a powerful initiating force, nothing happens. From a spiritual perspective, making an effort shows we are sincere in our intention.

What it does is it invokes or calls the spiritual forces closer to us to help and support us. As one teacher put it: if we only take two steps forward, spirit can only take one step towards us and we will not meet. If we take three steps forward, spirit will take four towards us and there is more chance of an encounter. But if we take four or even five steps towards God, God will take six or seven towards us and there will be a joyful encounter.

However, if we only effort, at some stage along the way, we will encounter limitation because certain important transformations simply cannot happen this way, not least because we are less open to receiving the fruits of what our efforts are essentially directed towards. We can see how this is so, for example, in a relationship. For example, if I just effort all the time, then I don’t really allow myself to enjoy my partner properly and savour the space that both of us create together.

I won’t allow the more receptive or feminine side of me, to come alive. In other words, if all I do is give, give , give, then I don’t allow my partner a space to give to me, I don’t allow a space of mutual sharing and blending; As such, I may be an insufficient ‘space’ for a deeper love to come alive between us.

I discovered the virtue of ‘letting be’ many years ago when I went out to India, to spend time with a Master who was very much of the school of ‘Let go, let God. Give up the search’. I, at the time, was overly imbalanced on the side of doing, in part, I think, because I didn’t trust life enough to believe that anything could happen unless I was always trying to make it happen. Anyhow, being with this wonderful man gave me a great lesson in the virtue of not doing. I had arrived at the ashram laden with books intending to make every minute count as I was taking so much time off my teaching and psychotherapy work. ’I’ll get some good thinking and writing done while I’m here, I’ll make this time off worthwhile, ’ I thought to myself.

What I didn’t reckon for was the power of this man’s energy field or presence to shatter my ‘good intentions’. In my first encounter with him, I was told that I was much too active and never gave myself space or time for my depths to surface.’ The you that thinks so much is the you that doesn’t allow you to transform. You know nothing about surrender and so you are shallow’, was the gist of what he said to me. It was painful to hear this but I knew it was true.

The next few months were a revelation of that truth. My active mind, or the mind that Buddhists call our ‘monkey’ mind and see as standing in the way of our deeper mind that is linked with our heart, became absolutely ‘zapped.’ Despite my ego fighting against what was happening, I was unable to ‘do’ anything. I couldn’t even think coherently! I certainly couldn’t meditate. So I just ‘hung out’. All my books that had cost me a fortune in overweight luggage, remained unopened. I went through a process that I subsequently realised is central to all deep spiritual work, and that was one of emptying or purifying myself, something that can actually only happen when a certain kind of effort is absent.

It wasn’t as if there was no struggle involved, for there was. But it was of a different nature; it was the struggle of trying to stay awake to all the crazy thoughts and burning up that I was going through, as I tried to get more and more out of my own way in order to allow myself to be opened up by spirit

In terms of inner progress, this was probably the most purposeful few months I have ever spent. I saw clearly how all my old-style efforting needed to change, how it was really a kind of diversion to prevent me really having to look deeply into myself. I saw how, after all these years, I was at last becoming a little naked and starting to be a tiny bit more human!

But, and this is an important point, I don’t think I would have been ready to have done this ‘surrendering work’ had I not first done my share of initial efforting in the way I did it. For example, if, on first embarking on my path, which I did in my early twenties, I had gone straight to this ashram, I think it would have been counter-productive, for there would not have been enough structure in me to give up. I would simply have surrendered to my own unconscious chaos and emotional turmoil. It was because I had worked through the worst of my fears and neuroses, with the result that I now had a much more solid sense of self, that I was now more ready to surrender it.

Paradoxically, we need a well- enough functioning ego structure first, before it is safe to begin dismantling our identification with it. Being spiritual, we must understand, is not just about becoming ‘egoless’. The gradual diminishing of ego must happen at the right time. When we are ready. (Many serial killers and paedophiles, for example, are people who don’t yet have enough ego – they have insufficient structure; That’s their problem.) It was also interesting to observe that everyone in this Master’s ashram had been on the path for some time and were not beginners.

As I understand it, then, spiritual work includes effort, and it needs surrender of it as in ‘Thy will, O Lord, be done.’ This surrender is important if we are to align ourselves to a deeper spiritual power or a deeper spiritual love. And it needs to be intentional. The distortions come if we only always embrace one polarity and not the other, or if we choose to focus more on one end of the spectrum when it is necessary that we be embracing the other.

What I am discovering now with many of my students and with myself that as we very gradually mature, both polarities become increasingly integrated within each other. At present, for example, I am writing a book and for this I need the discipline to sit down and write when I’d prefer to loaf around . However, once having ‘got into it’, I need to be able to surrender to spirit so the deeper part of me can also be ‘invited into’ the creative equation. Less and less now do I distinguish between doing and being.

I think, if we wish to live a balanced life - and for me this is essential if we are to be more fully human - that we are challenged to embrace both polarities until eventually they begin increasingly to converge inside us as we learn to ‘Do our Being’ and ‘Be our Doing’ together.

Is there any danger in unsupervised Spiritual Practices?

Question: I have just begun to do a powerful yoga practice and initially I felt marvellous from it.
In the last few weeks, however, something has changed, and I have been feeling spaced out and confused and for the last few nights, have had pins and needles going up my back and it has felt as if I am on fire. I am a bit afraid. Can you advise me what I should do?

Serge’s advice
Who told you to do this practice? Was it a respected teacher? If so, go to him at once and tell him what has been happening and take his advice. If not, and I suspect not as you are asking me, just stop the practice at once. Stop any form of meditation you may be doing and eat plenty of meat and do lots of exercise. What you need is grounding.

The point about spiritual practices is that they are powerful awakening tools and so doing them in an unsupervised way can sometimes be dangerous. Just as if you have never done much exercise, it is unwise to go into a gym and lift weights and go on the various machines without instruction – you may strain something and hurt yourself badly – so it is unwise to do unsupervised spiritual processes.

Kundalini
It sounds to me as if you are doing a process which is prematurely activating your kundalini energies. This is a wonderful thing if it happens naturally, as this powerful energy coiled up in the base of your spine can unwind itself and move up through our whole energetic structure, clearing away the blockages and expanding our awareness in the process. I believe this arising awakens our latent evolutionary intelligence.

However, if we try to force this process and activate this awakening before we are ready for it, we are, quite literally, playing with fire, for this kundalini energy is a kind of spiritual fire and can psychically burn us very badly and at worst can turn us psychotic. So take great care. Ask yourself why you are doing this process and if it is your ego self that is driving you, spiritually, to try to run before you can walk. Remember: there are no real short cuts on the path and the further we progress, the more important it is that our essential foundations be strong.

In the Tao to Ching, Lao Tsu wisely tells us that ‘Going on is going back.’ You may need to do a bit of going back! There are many books on the kundalini energy and I recommend any by the Indian Gopi Krishna. In his first book he talked about how a premature arising of this energy nearly sent him mad. So take great care. Lastly, if it was a teacher who recommended you do this process and if he does not respond with care and sympathy, then he is not being responsible, and I recommend you move away from him as quickly as possible.

Why is it easier for some people to deal with crisis than others?

Question:  Serge, why does it seem to be  so much easier for some people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than for others and  naturally to  feel more alive and joyful, all of which things always seem so hard for me? In other articles, you have written that crisis can act as an evolutionary trigger to get the best out of us. Well, it never seems  to do that  for me!  I feel down a lot of the time. Perhaps I am just a weak character. Can you advise me?
 
Serge. I would be pleased to.  First, let me say that I am sorry about how you describe  you feel, as it sounds as if you may be going through the old ringers a bit and I appreciate how tough that can be.  Secondly, I am sure you are not a weak character. Weak characters don't examine themselves, and you seem to  have a lot of awareness around your vulnerabilities. And here I  also remind you  that we all have vulnerabilities, and it doesn't mean we are weak, just that there are parts of us  that are less good at withstanding  certain kinds of stormy weather.

And  we need to be kind and loving to these parts of ourselves, and not be so hard on ourselves and compare ourselves with others. ( I mean if , looks wise,  I compared myself to Brad Pitt , I would never dare to venture outside my house !) So while not knowing anything about you, I imagine that you may  have some unresolved emotional wounds,  and that your heart has  perhaps been injured in some way and may be bleeding a bit. Perhaps it also has one or two locks and chains around it  too! Here, I am just guessing.

But if this is the case, then  bleeding, chained hearts slow us down at all levels of life.  I know a bit about this in terms of my own life, where, when I was younger, and before I did plenty of things to try to heal myself, I felt a lot of the things you have described. And more. My experience is that what  unhealed emotions can do, is that they make us less able to accomplish things that people whose hearts are more healed and less enchained, are capable of. Indeed, they  can plunge us down into what I will call a 'twilight world' or domain of being, where, to continue my metaphor, there ain't a  whole lot of sunlight available.  And we can stay trapped there. In my own situation, at that stage of my life, I needed others to pull me out, as my own boot straps were too soft for me to grab hold of! 

In other words, I needed help from outside  of myself, because I didn't yet  possess a  strong enough  sense of self or inhabit a domain that contained enough strength for me to assist myself on my own.  I always think that the main differences between us are not our skin colour, race or religion, but the kind of inner world we live in. Some worlds that people live in, are very beautiful. They are full of  colour and creativity and radiant joy and love. If one lives in them, one has the power to initiate things, to complete projects, to feel inspired and  to go with the flow,  to feel that the force is with us,  to deal with tragedy much more transformationally.

However, all these things are simply not possible for someone who does not  yet live under the laws of these 'sacred domains'. I have encountered people who live in  these 'higher worlds' and they always strike me as very empowered. Yet it is not that these people are better or cleverer or stronger than us ;  it is just , as I said, that they live in a domain of being where there are less restrictions, less rules, less constraints and more  freedom and power.  And in these domains, we are much more able to be   causal, to initiate things from within ourselves and  not be as much  at the effect of what is going on in our outer environment.

Unfortunately, many of us have not  yet learned to live  in these  more expanded realities. The psychologist Jean Huston once said that 'We are all born Stradivariuses and raised to believe we are plastic fiddles.' This was certainly true for me. And if  our inner world conspires to restrict us, our outer one will do so as well, for we will project our limitations upon it. For example, some of the 'rules' governing  our existing 'Consensus reality' that most of us live in most of the time and believe there is nothing else beyond it, include the idea that poverty cannot be alleviated or that war is something that cannot be done away with. And these, I maintain, are beliefs that pertain to a particular world of consciousness, which, if we are to have any kind of future world for our children, needs to be moved out of pretty fast!

Today, when  a client comes to see me for psychotherapy, I don't only look at what their issues are; I also try to evaluate   how much inner capacity they have to deal with them. Sometimes, a person  does not have serious problems but  because they are very vulnerable ,  may need a huge amount of help from me, and until such a time as they are able to move out of their twilight zones, I may need to do much of their work for them. Other people can have gone through huge  traumas, but because they live out of the laws and values of a higher world, they are much more able to deal  constructively with them. Do you sense what I am getting at?

So how do we move into these 'higher worlds', which, by the way, I believe are beckoning to all of us to ascend into, at this time in our evolutionary history? Well, lots of things. Above all, we need to want to evolve. We can ask spirit for help and spirit might be very obliging.  Then we can pray and we can meditate.  Very powerful for accelerating consciousness. But first, we need to heal our wounds. Body work. Psychotherapy. Shamanic work. 

If we try to bypass or transcend our  emotional problems and go all ' goo-ily pseudo-spiritual', we may get into a lot of difficulty as we may well draw down energies from higher states of consciousness that we are simply unable to integrate, and  the result may be that we are destabilised  even more. So go gradually. Some people feel called to  apprentice themselves to a Spiritual Master and live in his ashram and so partake of his refined energy field. There is no one way.

Each of us need to follow our own inclination.Where there's a will, there's a way. I healed myself because I got so fed up of feeling so down for so much of the time.  I am still healing myself!  I try to let my heart guide me.

What is needed if we are to become a Better Human Being?

Question : What do you see as the most important aspect of ourselves that needs awakening if we are to be a better human being?

Serge:
Undoubtedly, it is the heart, for it is in our hearts that the divine can communicate most directly to us. It is in our hearts that we may receive grace and healing. It is in our hearts that we can experience joy, ecstasy, love, feel awe, and experience ourselves as an integral part of all that is. If we are open hearted, a space is there enabling us to be spontaneous, brave , warm, true and honourable and we will much more easily be able to accept and respect ourselves and so accept and respect others and, most importantly, our planet.

Indeed, I see our hearts as containing the ‘spiritual fuel’ that will allow us to resolve conflicts, transform destructivity and generally enable us to be part of the solution, as opposed to being part of the problems, of our world. Teilhard de Chardin, that great theologian and visionary thinker, writing in the 1940’s, suggested that there was more power in an open heart than in the atom bomb.

I recognise this and see our hearts as being our greatest weapon of mass construction and believe that if only more of us learned to open our hearts, that we would be able to have peace in the world and that all the insane, crazy, stupid activities which we heartless or small-hearted humans like to do like flying planes into large towers, fighting wars, creating dictatorships to rule us, spending billions on weaponry while millions starve, consuming more than we need, destroying our environment, and generally behaving in greedy, rapacious, selfish and narrow minded ways, would stop!

All these behaviours are symptomatic of a deficient heart life. I don’t think our world will transform as a result of a change of mind. I think it needs a change of heart. Or rather, an opening of heart. We cannot have the one without the other. However, for such an opening to take place, we need to work at it. It is not a ‘given.’ Indeed, one of the best ways to learn how not to be so egoic, is to put effort into opening our hearts. The subtler vibration of the heart space begins to evaporate the denser one of ego space.

If our spirituality manifests not in what we know (how many sacred texts we can quote), but in how we behave and in how compassionately we treat others, especially those who may be very different to us, this is all dependant upon the health of our hearts. To a healthy hearted person, no one is an enemy. If our hearts are open, we will feel free and vital and the most natural thing in the world will be for us to wish for that condition to manifest all around us.

If our hearts are in ‘bad shape’ or closed, our perspective will radically alter and it is all too likely that we will see the world through a glass darkly, succumb to despair, bitterness and depression and so project all sorts of negatives onto it which do not in actuality exist. Thus to believe we can be authentically spiritual without being open-hearted is like believing we can play cricket without a bat and ball!

Because I feel so strongly on this matter, I have made several CDs on the topic of the Heart which can be ordered from my website. I also teach a one-year training group entitled Living from the Heart, where we learn to heal and purify and deepen as well as broaden, our heart life.

What are new ways that we can 'do' relationships?

Question: ' I am having a lot of problems in my relationship that I have been in for six years.
It seems as if the way my partner and I have both 'done relationship' is no longer working. Do you feel we may need to learn to 'do' our relationships in new ways?

Serge: Basically my answer is yes.  Many of our old ways of 'doing things' no longer work, and I believe this applies as much to the domain of relationship as it does in the world of business and finance.We are entering very new times; we are transiting out of  the Piscean Age into that of Aquarius and so we need 'New bottles for the new wine', new forms to 'house' the new emerging energies.

Indicative of this is that more of us demand more of ourselves and of life.  Many of us feel moved to grow and explore the higher reaches of our human beingness  and  it can be  often hard to do this within the old structures of relationship, especially within the conventional framework of old-style marriages where  the aim is to 'settle down' and where there is a tacit agreement not to call one another on one's 'stuff', in order to 'keep the peace'! Well, for many couples, this repressive way of being doesn't work any more. I think one of the aims of relationship is also to grow and develop and to explore with  our partner how both  of us may become more fully human.

There is a beautiful quotation by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: 'For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult task of all....the work for which all other work is but preparation. It is a high inducement for the individual to ripen....a great exacting claim upon us, something that chooses us out and calls us to vast things.'  

I love this. We need to learn to re-ennoble our relationships, to  see  relationship as a sacred mission, as opposed to   it either being something to fall  unconsciously into, in order  to be comfortable or to legitimise our having children. When couples come to see me for counselling, I always try to help them see their relationship in this light as it recontextualises it and in my experience, allows them to work through their various challenges much more satisfactorily.

Am I spiritual if all I seem to encounter are no-very-nice things about myself?

Question: I have begun being seriously on my spiritual path and a lot of the time I find myself in a lot of pain often around having to face some not-very-nice things about myself. This isn’t quite what I had expected. I had hoped to come face to face with a more radiant me and to experience a lot of spiritual light. I am not encountering any of this despite meditating regularily and doing my best to live a disciplined spiritual life. Consequently, I am becoming a bit disillusioned.

How am I off beam? Any advice?


Serge’s advice
Well, well well, if you don’t mind me saying, you seem to have a bit of a naïve or romantic idea about what the spiritual path involves, which is certainly not just about sitting on mountaintops basking in radiant light. The aim, I remind you, is not to get ‘high’or to try to feel good (although en route we may experience both). Rather, the aim is to be free, to discover who we really are; the aim is about our trying to return to our source where we can experience our true Self, which is one with all that is. That is the aim. It is about finding our truth.

And this can often be tough, because en route, we need to encounter our untruth, that is, we need to have a clearer idea of the false us, of the ‘pretend’ or the ‘socialised’ us which includes seeing the parts of us that may be arrogant, selfish, inauthentic, etc. And we all have these parts! It follows that unless we can see these aspects of ourselves more clearly, we cannot work transformationally with them. Indeed, this is one of the things that spiritual light, when it comes, often does for us; it illuminates or ‘lights up’ what is untruthful about how we live; it reveals our obstacles or what stands in the way of our being spiritual. From what you say, it appears that this is currently happening with you. If so, it isn’t ‘bad’.

On the contrary. The fact that you seem to be confronting your ‘dark side’ big time, seems to be evidence of your meditation and endeavours towards spiritual discipline paying off. In other words, you seem to be pretty on track. What your problem is, is that you have a rather one-dimensional perspective of what you perceive the spiritual life to be about!

Let me remind you how the late Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche described being on the path. He saw it as being akin to ‘Licking honey off the razor’s edge’. Carl Jung also reminded us that ‘We don’t become enlightened by sitting in the light, but by going into our darkness.’ And just as light will illumine it for us, so by going deeply into our dark side, we discover more light.

So my advice to you is to accept what is happening and don’t see it as being the result of some mistake, or you doing something wrong, but on the contrary, as evidence of you doing a lot right, and of you being strong enough to face your dark side. I am sorry if you are currently undergoing suffering, but it really is, at times, a very integral part of the whole purificational process.

I recommend you read that great little spiritual classic, ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ by St. John of the Cross. It may offer you comfort as well as give you some important insights. Also, don’t forget that darkness does give way to light. It is always when night is at its very blackest that the first slivers of dawn begin appearing in the sky. I trust that very soon this will be happening for you.

How may I choose the right partner?

Question: Why am I so bad at choosing men?
‘ I am a woman of 28. I am attractive and intelligent. I think I am basically a nice person; I have a good job. Everything in my life works well other than the relationship side. I never seem to ‘go for’ the right man and if I do find someone who seems right, something always seems to go wrong. Relationships are always so painful for me. Can you offer me some advice as to why I seem to be so bad in choosing men?

Serge’s advice
As I do not know you personally and thus can have no insight into what your specific issues are, all I can offer you are some general comments which may be of help. The first thing to ‘get’, is that with most of us, the agendas that make us be attracted to one person and not another - for example, why a woman may like ‘rogues’ or older men or cold men or ‘mummy’s boys’ or violent or very wounded men – tends to be pretty unconscious.

Rather like an iceberg which only shows a small percentage of its overall size above water (95% of its mass is submerged) most of us are relatively unaware as to why we choose the partners that we do and why we ‘act out’ the relationship dynamics that we do. I recently read a case history of a very beautiful and intelligent young woman who had the world at her feet, yet who went and married a man who not only was disfigured, but also was impoverished and cruel, and who badly mistreated her. How could this have been?

It transpired that she had been an orphan and her husband’s name was very similar to that of her real father whom she had never known. What it did was trigger deep unconscious yearnings in her for that paternal love which she never got and which consequently became transferred lock, stock and barrel onto him. She never saw the ‘real him’, only her image of him. It reminds me of what that character in Childhood’s End, the Martian, said, when asked what he thought about human love. ‘It seems to be a projection from the lens of the mind onto whatever object most approximates one’s fantasy!’ Perhaps this is what you do! If so, try to understand your fantasy and what might underlie it.

It is also important to ask yourself if your parents’ relationship worked, and if not, are you in some way, mimicking it! Did you feel ‘good’ around your father and mother? How is your self-esteem? How do you feel about yourself in relationship?

It may be, for example, that underneath your ‘good personality’ and attractiveness and surface confidence, lies a little girl, who, secretly, may not value herself sufficiently, may not feel she is ‘really loveable’, may not believe she deserves to be loved by a ‘good man’, even if consciously you know that this is not the case. It may be that you are unconsciously creating a dysfunctional pattern reminiscent of something in your childhood, and hence are ‘choosing’ or ‘being drawn towards,’ partners with a dysfunction ‘compatible’ with your own, in order that the two of you can ‘enact out’ a particular neurotic scenario together.

Perhaps, secretly, you are scared of intimacy and so ‘play safe’ either by ‘choosing’ someone whom you don’t really want to be close with, and so can discard, or someone who is himself incapable of intimacy with you, as he is so Narcissistically wounded, and therefore can discard you. (I mention Narcissism as this wound is so prevalent in our society today, and lies behind so much of our hurt in relationship.) It may be too, that you are not especially skilled at working at relationships, or that you give up when you hit a bumpy patch!

Let’s face it: relationships are extremely challenging and require a lot of work. And often, when we open our hearts up to another, it brings up our deepest fears. For instance, our hearts may hold memories of abuse or betrayal in the name of love. These wounds may not just relate to events in our current life, but we may sometimes be suffering from some kind of ‘carry over’ or unresolved memory from a prior incarnation, where being in love, say, led to pain or even death. If this is the case, and I have often uncovered such scenarios with couples I have worked with, then there is a real, unconscious, ‘vested interest’ to see that our relationships don’t work out!

Could this be the case, perhaps, with you?

If you want to enjoy happier relationships, it is important that you do some serious digging and explore what really lies behind your difficulties and what you can do to heal yourself. And there is a lot. One of the best ways to do this is to go into Psychotherapy. You can also attend relationship workshops and read books about relationship to deepen your understanding (everything by John Wellwood I highly recommend).

As you learn, gradually, to recognise the nature of your wounding, you may come to realise that it is possible, gradually, to work at changing your internal dynamics. As this begins to occur, your external reality will also shift and you may one day find yourself being attracted to a different kind of man - one who ‘fits’ the changed, healthier pattern. In other words, as you become more conscious of your old ‘pain games’ and work at releasing them, a new space may open up in you enabling you to ‘play’ a deeper and more fulfilling kind of ‘relationship game’. Instead of sturm und drang, you can instead draw someone into your life with whom you can enjoy harmony and happiness.

Lastly, I would suggest that you see your relationship issues not just as problems to battle with and hold you back, but rather as challenges to help you grow into your deeper humanity. Sometimes the pain experienced in our relationships can act as an important spur to explore ourselves more deeply, resulting in benefits that may accrue to many other areas of our lives as well. I wish you luck.

How may I work with the parts of me that fear change?

Question: Serge, I really want to change  so many things in my life. I want a better spiritual life, better relationships with people. I want to be a kinder person, eat a better diet, etc. But it is very hard. I am so stuck in my old habits and I so fear the unknown. Can you give me any advice?

Serge: I think you are very honestly enunciating the real difficulties we all have in changing things in our lives. Deep down we all have a kind of secret prayer that goes like this: ‘O please God, may my life be different; may I feel happier and more secure; may all the things I want, come about. But please achieve this  for me without me needing to change anything!’

Change, as you rightly say, is difficult. We get stuck in our old habit-patterns. Our problem is that we form identities around how we image ourselves and then we get so sunk into  these grooves that we cannot then climb out of them. Gurdjieff talked about this  phenomenon a lot. He used to say that as a species, we were so inert, that unless faced with a shock greater than the sum of our own inertia, we tended to stay as we are. He also suggested, and this I have found eminently true in terms of my clients in psychotherapy, that we will give up almost everything but our suffering, as that is the one thing we remain most attached to!  I mean, who would we be if we weren’t a miserable old  hard-done-by, ‘poor me’ victim!

His words are proving true, aren’t they, in terms of our ecological situation. For years, our scientists have been pointing out how bad things were becoming and how important it was that we changed our high-energy-consuming lifestyles. But did we do so? No! It is only now that things have become really bad - the suffering reaching the domain of  the unbearable - with our tsunamis, storms, earthquakes and droughts bearing down on us - that we are at last beginning to wake up and  change, and are realising  to our horror, that, as the old Chinese proverb goes, ‘Unless we change our ways , we are bound to end up where we are headed!’

So I would counsel you to not let things get that bad in your life, before you begin to work towards change, for it can be that one can leave things too late.  We can reach a point of no return, as well we might have done, ecologically, on our planet!

So think about what you would like in your life - how you would like your life to be. Get an image of a ‘future you’ functioning in the world as if all the shifts you want implemented, have already taken place. And let this new image come into you and feed you. Meditate on it. Then,  from this  new strong place, think about what is stopping you being that which you wish to be and having that which you wish to have. Then think about  what you can do about these ‘stoppers’   and therefore what some of your challenges might be. In doing this,  also know  that whenever we go for something new, there will always be resistance.  And this resistance  is not bad and it cannot be ignored and indeed, must be worked with.

So perhaps find  a wise friend or a  skilled psychotherapist to discuss things with. Or take yourself on an organised spiritual retreat. I am a big one for the therapeutic and the spiritual benefits of  doing this, i.e., leaving behind our ‘normal workaday reality’ to give ourselves  new space to  reflect on our lives, which  is something not enough of us allow ourselves  nearly enough time to do.

I think  that if we really give ourselves the space to let our hearts tell us what we need to do or not do, in order to live a more satisfying life, and, from that place, confront the pain of what is currently not working and standing in the way of this, that we come into a much better place of being able to advance our lives. I think it is far less painful to experience our sadness or despair or whatever emotions are lurking inside us, than not let ourselves feel at all. If we don’t feel, we are kind of dead. It sounds like you want to be more fully alive in everything you do. So celebrate that. Good luck.

Does Evil Exist and if so What Should We Do About It?

Question: 'Serge, do you believe in the reality of evil? Do you think it exists? if so, what should we do about it?

Serge: I do believe in evil, yes, and certainly feel that if we are to have a better world  that we should  understand  it and, if we feel strong enough,  confront it and not bury our heads, ostrich-like, and pretend it is not there. You know that old saying about evil being allowed when good people do nothing.  Well, it's true! However, if we are to 'do anything' about evil, we need to recognise its many different faces. The way I see it is that there are two kinds of evil: obvious evil and non-obvious evil. Obvious evil is, well, obvious.  It is about Hitler, Robert Mugabe, Darfur, Stalin, Genocide, Auschwitz, murder, torture, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Etc.

What is far more important, I think, is  the non-obvious evil which sits under our noses and which W.H. Auden described as being present at our breakfast table. Krishnamurti saw 'The evil of our time' as being about 'The loss of consciousness of evil.' I define this evil as the evil of our living a wholly self-centred, unconscious life, where we take no responsibility for our actions, where  we make money out of exploitating the weak and vulnerable, where  the Have's  of the world don't try to help those who have nothing. For me, war is evil and it emerges when we make enemies out of somone or some race or tribe or nation upon whom we project our disowned hostility and aggression.

I think this evil comes out of a numb heart, where we either cannot or do not  feel the consequences of our actions. Scott Peck in his book 'People of the Lie',  suggested that many evil people are so-called 'Solid citizens, who may be rich or poor,  and have normal jobs (i.e., they can be  school teachers or bankers , etc) .  Their evil is that 'They commit crimes against life and aliveness, yet  these crimes are so covert and  subtle that they cannot be designated as crimes. ' What is most evil is the absurd notion that if we wage war against it, that we will kill it off, or, as many terrrorists believe, that good will come about if those who see the world differently to oneself, are eliminated. As recent world events have shown, this only increases it. Indeed,  our desire to be heroic  and 'good', lies behind a lot of surplus evil.

So what do we do? Several things. Firstly, we recognise this as well as recognise   the darkness inside our own hearts - our own violence and unconsciousness - and work with that as opposed to projecting it outside of ourselves all the time. In other words, we open our eyes to where we like to scapegoat or make others wrong for those 'motes in our own eyes' that we refuse to see, and we take back our projections and in doing so, unhook ourselves from any thoughts or activities that help keep evil alive in the world. Then, we seek to fill the 'vacated space' with unitive qualities that emerge as we open our hearts - that is, we  try to flood our awareness with thoughts of peace and love and compassion.

Then we follow this up with activities that benefit life. For example, we give up our jobs selling AK47 rifles and instead we create a project for peace or we start a business  selling organic vegetables - engaging in activities that don't damage our planet. Moving away from evil is all about a shift in consciousness, where we intentionally cease being part of the problems of the world to being part of their solution. In this context, it is  important to remember Mother Theresa's wise words , to the effect that 'We don't curse the darkness, instead we light a light!'

i.e. We don't hate evil; we understand its place in the order of things, but we seek to understand it and deal with it intelligently. The more we dedicate  our lives to thinking lovingly and positively,  to acting out of the truth of our hearts, the more light we generate, and  the less space this allows for evil to exist. Working with world evil is everybody's responsibility.

How do we know if we have found the right guru?

Question: I am experiencing something funny going on with the guru I have just begun studying with. I don’t know what it is but I don’t feel right about him. I keep wanting to break from him and he keeps telling me that I should persevere. But I am not sure. I feel I have given him too much power over my life, and that’s not good, but on the other hand, I know one is supposed to surrender to a guru, so I am confused. What should I do?

Serge’s advice
This is a challenging issue. Sometimes feeling bad about a teacher is a sign that something is not right with them and one should move away. You say he is your guru. Is he an established spiritual Master or is he simply a charismatic leader of some particular sect? That is an important question you need to ask yourself. So beware, there are a lot of rascally so-called sages out there treading the spiritual highway!

If he is an established Master and if he is authentic as a teacher, it may simply be that he is not for you. (We are all on different paths and therefore need different teachers and teachings, and he may just not be ‘your teacher’) However, sometimes, the urge to move away may not be because the teacher is rascally or not right, It may be because he is right and the power of his presence is simply bringing up something very big for us that really needs exploring and that makes us feel uncomfortable. So instead of looking at the mole in our own eye, we make our teacher into the ‘baddie’!

What I suggest you do first of all is not see this issue as a problem but more as a spiritual challenge asking you to develop your powers of discernment. And to tune into the discerning part of you, I suggest you take time to tune into a quiet space inside yourself and begin to connect with your deeper being – or with your own inner guru – for there is a part inside all of us that knows the answer to all these kinds of questions. You might close your eyes and ask that part of yourself that is wise to come forward and reveal itself.


Questions you could then ask yourself about your teacher could include:

• Do you feel he is authentic and wants the best for you?
• Do you feel he sees you deeply? 
• Do you feel empowered in his presence? 
• Do you feel your life has advanced since you have been with him?

If the answer to these issues is predominantly a ‘yes’, then you may well be avoiding something. If so, wrestle with yourself and see what that thing is. If the answer is mainly no, then there may be a lot in what you feel and you might well be wise to move away. Simply because a teacher asks you to surrender to him, does not mean you should also give up your discernment. I also recommend that you buy that spiritual classic, The Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda as that deals beautifully with the whole guru/student relationship.

If we have issues, when should we seek the support of a Psychotherapist and when should we ask a Spiritual Master to help us?

Question: 'I have a big emotional problem that is really interfering with my life and that seems to be getting worse as I grow up. As I feel I am a spiritual person, should I find  a Spiritual Teacher to take it to ( in Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, he says that their role is to eat up their devotee's karma!), or should I try and work it through with a Psychotherapist?

Serge. This is a very interesting question and it asks us to be clear about the different functions of the Guru and  the Psychotherapist. Basically we could say that  they address different levels of the psyche:  most spiritual masters  aren't so interested in our 'personal life' - whether we enjoy good sex or have healthy relationships, feel happy - all that stuff - but are more concerned with our spiritual or impersonal life - how close to God we are able to come. 

In a similar way, the aim of most psychotherapists is primarily to focus on our personal lives, on  what is 'wrong' with our personalities . As a generality, one  could say that the aim of the guru is to help us be better and  that of the therapist to help us feel better!

However,  many changes  are beginning to take place. Today, many Spiritual Masters are learning much more about the world of psychology and  are increasingly coming to recognise, for example, that if a devotee is still angry with their personal father, that this is bound to contaminate how they see their 'Heavenly Father'. In a similar vein,   many Psychotherapists are  also realising that many emotional wounds may only be properly healed if that person also recognises the  importance of honouring the spiritual dimensions of their lives. So the issue is not so much, an either/or one.

However, given the fact that at present you don't seem to have a Spiritual Master and that what you say about their eating up one's karma, only happens  rarely and only if the master is pretty enlightened and  only if you have been a disciple for a long time, I would say you were better off to go to a spiritually-oriented Psychotherapist who will be able to work with you in such a way as to link your emotional problem with your spiritual development and  perhaps help you see that far from it being an obstacle,  it  may actually be  an integral part of what you need to work through in your journey to come closer to who you are.

This does not mean that you do not continue doing whatever spiritual practices you might be doing at present, such as meditation, but do not necessarily think that meditation alone will  solve your problem. As this whole area  is the field in which I work, you can ring or email me and I might be able to advise you of someone who might help you, who lives in your area.

Many relationships fail because people hold naïve expectations about them or  feel they should be easy and that one shouldn’t need to ‘work’ at them.  I do my best to remind people that these  notions are myths and so try and help them work at their relationships together.

• Individual Soul-based Psychotherapy and Coaching
• Couples Soul-based Psychotherapy
• Skype Psychotherapy for Individuals and Couples

What are the advantages of going on a Spiritual Retreat?

Question: 'Do you think it wise to go on  a Spiritual Retreat if we want to find ourselves? I feel  the answer is yes,  and I want to go on one, but my boyfriend  and my father both think it is me escaping. What do you think?'

Serge: What I think - and I hope you don't mind me saying this, and I hope they don't read this - is that it sounds a bit judgemental and controlling of them. (What we often do with things that we don't understand and which may secretly  scare us, is that we put them down!) I agree with you and I urge you to do what your heart tells you is right. 

Actually, I think that not going on a retreat ,  not taking ourselves away from our 'normal world' from time to time, is escaping.  The problem with many of us today is that we are all too full of 'stuff' - anxieties about work, anxieties about  how our world  is about to collapse  and where we will all go broke (our media loves pumping out this negativity all the time) , and I think we need time to step away from all this madness, so we have space to explore our  much-neglected inner world, ask ourselves what is really important  for us, and inquire as to who we really are!

 I have conducted Spiritual_Retreats_in_Majorca for many years  now, and I have found them  both therapeutic and healing.  And, most important, fun! Many of us need more fun in our lives. We have become too heavy! And retreats allow us to unwind; they give us time to play and be quiet, and ask ourselves questions as to how we really wish to live.

What is madness and how may we deal with it from a Spiritual perspective?

Question: Could you say a little about madness and how one deals with it from a spiritual perspective?

 Serge. It depends on what kind of madness you are referring to. In my books, there are three distinct kinds. The first  kind is what  we ordinarily think of as madness,  that is, people who have great difficulty functioning effectively in society and  who may need to spend large chunks of their lives in special institutions . These people  are  the psychotics. They  often feel persecuted and paranoid. They may pick up messages  from the cosmos signalling that  dark forces are out to get them or  they may  hear voices telling them to do awful things.

This kind of madness does not  generally respond well to subtle energy. Trying to focuss loving energy on such people or suggesting they meditate or visit a guru  is generally counter productive. In most instances, what they need  is   help from someone trained to  understand them and generally to be fed strong medication to  help calm them. When they are in a calmed state, they may then be more  open to  a spiritual imput.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have 'divine madness', the madness afflicting people who are  drunk with ecstasy,  who are filled with  God's joy and love, and who are regarded as mad because they often feel  little need to conform to the orthodox rules of our society.  (They are in touch with 'higher law'!)In this bracket I would inlude teachers of the 'Crazy Wisdom' tradition such as Adi Da ( whose method of awakening is  often to trick people), the late Osho with his fleet of rolls royces, or 'rascal sages' such as Gurdjieff ,who would often teach by shocking his students. Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint, was  a true divine drunkard! He was  once found in such a  rapturous state , that ants were beginning to eat up his leg and he never noticed!

 Of course this is not madness at all. These people are 'super sane' and live  from their hearts . They are connected  to divine law; they are  wise, open channels or conduits for divine qualities to flow through them and so 'come from' a very different place than from where you and I come from ( or certainly from where I come from!) Indeed, so linked up  are they to the will of God, that they care little for social niceties or with cultivating pleasing personalities. If you encounter such a  'mad person', you will only come face to face with truth, and if your usual way of relating, is via your artificial, 'socialised' self, you  will probably feel very awkward in their company !

The sad thing is that  these remarkable and awake  human beings, are, as I said,  generally regarded as  being bonkers by those people whom I see as being  the true members of the  real stark-raving-bonkers brigade -  i.e., the  normals!  And here I refer to the vast majority of us who see ourselves as 'normal' and  nice and who  live our lives primarily by  adhering to the rules of convention. Normal, nice man, R.D. Laing reminded us, has been responsible for killing millions and millions  of his fellow,  normal, nice men over the last century, and  has delighted in spending billions  a year on this enterprise, with the result that there is never enough to help the billions on our planet who are starving. Yesterday, on the television, I saw Tony Blair answering questions on the Iraq war and  putting on his normal ' Tony acting sincere  show' and I thought to myself:  'That man is a good example of someone truly stark raving bonkers!'

You see, what normal man does, is that he lives his life in a small narrow box where anything and everything that he does not understand or that does not fit into it,  is either  said not to exist or is labelled 'insane'. Everybody else is   wrong and he is always right! Anything that he doesn't like to face about himself, he projects onto other people. The great visionary Psychologist Abraham Maslow was only too well of the craziness of 'normal man', and described him as 'Living in a state of chronic psychopathology and crippling immaturity'!

Your question was : how do we deal with madness from a spiritual perspective? Well, my answer is that  the madness that  truly needs focussing on, is this madness. And how we deal with it , is  that we recognise it for what it is and  what it results in, and from this place,  we seek to see how and where we too, might be any part of it, and if so, what we can do to  change our ways.   What is also very important is   that we try to expose ourselves as much as possible to those afflicted with divine madness, in the hopes that something of the vision. beauty and wisdom of these great adepts may enter us and pull the scales off our eyes - rub off on us in some way, as this will speed things up for us.

Perhaps this is not the answer you were expecting to your question, but it is the one I am giving you.