Does my penchant for cruel wit destroy my spiritual growth?

Question. ‘I have been trying to live life with more kindness towards others, but I sometimes find myself thinking very uncharitable (though admittedly funny) thoughts about people. Is it possible to have humour without a degree of unkindness attached? I find most ‘gentle’ humour incredibly dull but am worried that my penchant for cruel wit is destroying my spiritual growth.’ Adie. Suffolk.

Serge. We all have a dark side to ourselves which we need to acknowledge. So join the gang! And here, I mean dark in two senses: firstly, I mean a side of ourselves that is ‘in shadow’ or that we are unaware of, and secondly, a side that may not be as ‘nice’ or as kind as we might like. Here, we need to remind ourselves of something which the great Vietnamese Peace Activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, once said, namely, that there is a murderer and rapist inside all of us! So if you only have a cruel, dark sense of humour, that ain’t that bad!

And well done that you can see and acknowledge this fact, as most of us are not that honest with ourselves.  Unlike you, we like to prance around pretending that we are ‘only kind’ and prefer to hide from ourselves those parts of us that we don’t want to see, which we instead go about projecting onto others. However, the moment we start to recognise and so ask questions about some particular negative trait that we have, the more we possess the capacity to stand back from it, to no longer give it energy, which means that it need no longer control us in the same way. We potentially ‘have’ it; not the other way round. And it seems you are beginning to do just this around what you term your ‘cruel wit’. Well done.

However, I agree with you. If you were to allow this part of you to run you, and if it were to come out all the time, and you were to do nothing about it, then this would be detrimental to your spiritual development.  It would in particular drown out your potentiality for kindness. Thoughts, we must remember,  are ‘things’, and kind thoughts sent out, elevate us and  fill others with kindness, in the same way  that unkind thoughts  demean and narrow us and fill the world with unkindness. As Jesus put it: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is!’

However, if, on the other hand, you choose to work with this issue – which includes remembering that at the moment you are about to demean someone for your own amusement, you instead send out a kind thought to them,  then you can use this to deepen your sense of self and help  you grow your soul life.

I think humour exists at many levels, and that what we find funny at any time – or what ‘turns us on’, as they say - reflects the level that we are at. The problem we all face is that we live in a society which feels more and more insecure and so we have become more and more attached to needing to make fun of others as some kind of bogus palliative – to try to prop us up. But it never works. So I would say this to you: observe where you may have taken on the shadow of the society around you. Observe the part of you that ‘gets off’ by making fun of others.  Ask yourself where this comes from and what you really ‘get’ out of it? Is laughing at, as opposed to with , particular kinds of people,  perhaps about  artificially trying to elevate yourself, so that you don’t feel so bad yourself   about, say, being thick or fat or bald or  gay or short or unattractive  or drawn to wierdos ( or whatever  it is that you find hard to accept about yourself?) If you can be really honest here, and get more and more of what Jung called our Shadow side up into the light of day, and then you work with it, you will be able gradually to transform yourself.

The result will be that bit by bit, you will find yourself increasingly able to celebrate gentle humour, as you start discovering all sorts of funny, hidden depths in simple little things.  Indeed, you will begin accessing a new level of humour, one that comes from the joy inside your heart and which is inherently empowering of life. And the more you work at this, the less you will feel a need to make fun of others and the more you will be moved to share fun with others.  This is a very significant shift. If we are fun – if a sense of the humorous side of life fun dances inside our hearts – then we are flowing with the inherent humour which endows all of Creation. And when this new space arises inside us, the need to demean others, even if it is just in thought, wholly evaporates.  We discover that God is a great joker. How else those baboons with pink bottoms could have been created, or some of those curious looking multi-coloured puffer fish that live miles down in our oceans!

I think that learning to be more fun is something which we all need to put energy into, and in part, it comes from allowing ourselves to laugh in a positive way - with life and not at it. This is so important and so healing. Life can be pretty heavy and tragic at times, and the right kind of humour can help dissolve this, make us more aware of the fact that life really does have a lighter side to it. Norman Cousins, who was Secretary General at the U.N. many years ago, understood this. He had been diagnosed with terminal Cancer. He refused all treatment. Instead, he bought hundreds of slapstick comedy films - lots of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy stuff. (I suppose if it were more recent, he’d have included Fawlty Towers!) Then he took himself to bed and spent all day laughing. After six months, his whole system was clear of the disease.

Just as there is nothing less soulful than laughing at others, so there is nothing more transformational than laughing with others.  This is one of the keys to world peace.  I can’t help feeling that if more of us were to train ourselves to make this shift and to recognise and celebrate the truly humorous side of life, we would start unlocking many great spiritual secrets!  I hope what I’ve said may be of help.

Spiritual Trainings and Retreats with Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens.

Photo Images supplied by Jef Bettens www.iamjef.be

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.

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.

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.