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 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.