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.

WHY  I BELIEVE SPIRITUALITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN RELIGION

Question: Serge. I was brought up as a ‘good Christian’ and for many years, used to go to church regularly. However, more and more I am feeling that  not only  is this not helping me to grow , but I also question whether religion is really helping our world to grow. In many instances, it seems it is holding it back.    I think what our world needs is more spirituality and less religion,  and I would very much value what you think.

 

Serge:  I wholeheartedly agree with you and    basically think that while there are of course many fine people who are deeply  ‘good’ and spiritual, and who have  become  that way as a result of their particular faith, that  there are also many others  just as fine, who have become like that without  being connected to any particular religion.  Indeed, I know many people in many different countries who are working very hard, in their own respective fields, to help  create a healthier world and who  would never see themselves as being especially religious.

 

I think one of the great tragedies of these times we are living in - and it underlies so many of the serious problems we have to face today - is  that , as a species, we are suffering from an epidemic of  soulfulness, leading to a powerful disconnection from who we really are. The theologian Matthew Fox once observed that ‘Our civilisation is without a cosmology and therefore is cosmically lonely and depressed.’ And as a psychotherapist, I absolutely agree. Trying to fill that huge, soulless void inside  so many of us, leads to unhealthy tendencies such as  our over-consuming, overeating and drinking,  taking drugs, being obsessed with materiality and celebrity ( leading us  to deify glamorous nonentities), burglarising our planet’s limited resources,  as well as engaging in constant war and scapegoating, to name just a few of our  many malaises.

 

And if religion’s role ought surely to be to help us combat this, that is, point  us towards a better or  a nobler way of living , or helping us connect to something inwardly  more substantial, sadly, it often fails in its mission. Indeed, all too often, religion  seems to be hijacked by those very  soulless forces that it ought to be protecting us against. I am really sorry to say  all this, because I am privileged to know some Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Jews who are truly very fine human beings,  and who embody the true spiritual depths of their traditions. But, in my opinion, they are the exception and not the rule. In my opinion, many of our world problems are cemented in place as a result of our different religious beliefs.
 
 Just look at all the barbaric atrocities committed in religion’s name over the last two thousand years: The Crusades, the ‘Religious wars’ of the seventeenth century, the more recent obliteration of the native American Indians, to name but a few, and today ,  we have the conflicts between Protestant and Catholic,    between Muslim and Christian,  Sunni and Shiite etc. We must  also not forget the  growing horrors of Fundamentalism: the Islamofascists on one side and the Christofascists on the other, both of whom seem to be longing for our beautiful planet to be obliterated so that they and they alone, the  glorified ‘chosen ones’, can ascend into Heaven in glory - enjoy oodles of virgins or sit at the right hand of God Almighty or whatever - while the rest of us  poor miserable sinners can  go frazzle ourselves  in hell!

 

And this is scary stuff.  And I believe we will only pull through the many crises we face as a result of a raised self awareness and an ultimate desire to awaken to our deeper ‘enlightened’ humanity, as we  learn to love and honour our fellow human beings and embrace that unity existing in our diversity.  I think we need to learn to find peace, joy and love in our hearts, to rediscover a sense of awe and appreciation and respect for our planet which we have so greedily trashed. In a word, we need to open to our deeper Mystical Self,  for therein  lies our true creativity. Indeed,  I think that if life on Earth is to carry on, increasing numbers of us need to awaken and become Practical Mystics, bringing  truly human values into everything we do –  into our work, our relationships, our thoughts, our politics, our economics, etc.

 

And with some notable  exceptions, I don’t think - with the exception of Buddhism (so far as I know, no one has died in the name of this faith) –  that religion on the whole  provides this. For example, I think it atrocious that the beauty and subtlety of  the great religion of Islam is  currently being trounced by those rogue imans who preach jihad and incite Muslims to kill non-Muslims. I  think it  very sad that so many Christian priests today,  who  presumably have never been trained in the mystical traditions, instruct us to know about God as opposed to helping us actually  to experience the divine. It is no wonder  that  those who are genuine spiritual seekers go elsewhere for their inspiration, while the young  tend to flee the often arid atmospheres of churches where they are preached at to be more like Jesus, yet never instructed in the transformational possibilities of how this might come about. The point is that if a priest is disconnected from the source about which he speaks – if his connection to the divine is merely through his head and not with his heart - then his words will have little power to heal or inspire.

 

Jesus once said that we needed new bottles for the new wine and I  believe this. Sadly, I think too many religions have been hijacked by people with fearful egos (mainly men), and so have a tendency to look  too much back to the past and so while talking the language of transcendence, fail to move us in this direction. While the great  prophets and visionaries of all the great religions  look forward and speak exactly the same unitive language, the tragedy is that their great teachings have today become  increasingly watered down. Perhaps this is why the Dalai Lama , in a recent lecture,   made the following observations:

 

‘Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit – such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, which brings happiness to both self and others….There is no reason why the individual should not develop these, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can do without. What we cannot do without are these basic human values.’

 

How my heart dances to hear those words. Yes, spirituality can be found without  our needing to be a card-carrying member of a particular faith and without  our  ever needing to visit a mosque, temple or church in our lives.  We don’t need to believe in things to find God. Actually, it is our beliefs about God that  often get in our way. Certainly, if we feel particularly called to a certain religion,  we must answer that call. But if we do not, and many today  do not, and feel this more generalised pull towards spirituality as a whole, then we must trust that spirit will also guide us. Indeed, I say that whatever we choose to engage in that  helps connect us to our own soul life and that makes our heart dance, is where we  can find  our spirituality. As such,  so many, many things can be powerful catalysts.

For example: nature can be. Or poetry. Or  beautiful music. Or enjoying the company of people we love.  Or playing with our children. Or doing a work we love. Or being kind and compassionate to people. Or engaging in something that we find inspirational. Or serving life is some way. Or opening to beauty.  Or feeling awe. Or being peaceful. Or standing up for truth and justice, etc,etc. Or praying or meditating. (We don’t have to be religious to do these things.) All these activities help strengthen our spiritual muscles. Indeed, if we engage in just the above activities, the conditions become  powerfully  set up for us to grow our soul life very powerfully..

 

My point is that spirituality is not something we become; it is something each of us innately are , which, sadly,  most of us learn to lose touch with as we ‘grow up’ (what a paradox!)  And if it is true that  we are  all fashioned in the image of God,  then God consciousness dances inside every cell of our bodies, and it is a question of how this  knowing can be most appropriately  realised. And  our problem is that many conventional religions don’t help us here. In Christianity,   for example, all too often we are made to feel guilty for our ‘fallen-ness’ and ‘sinful body’.  And this takes us further away from ourselves.  I  fully agree with Matthew Fox when he suggested that Adam’s main ‘sin’ was not  allowing himself to enjoy the Garden sufficiently and that too much emphasis has been put on Jesus’ crucifixion.

 

Speaking generally, I think there are several key things that contemporary religion fails to offer us. Firstly, it  often fails to help us connect to  the celebration of our shared human unity as an  actual experience, as opposed to it being an intellectual ‘nice idea’.  In addition, few religions do enough to foster a deeper understanding of the innate  beauty and juiciness of life, which in turn can help us connect  more fully to our  own celebratory nature. This is  perhaps why so many of us relate to  our sexuality  so unhealthily. And , we remember,   the erotic impulse in us is strong – eros is as important  to our spirituality as agape -  and  again, religion ought to help us  here, help us tune in to the sacredness of our sexuality, help us understand that if we are to be a whole human being ( holiness is connected to wholeness) that our sexuality needs to be more appropriately integrated.  Sadly, most of the time it doesn’t!

 

In addition,  again with the exception of Buddhism,  few religions actually instruct us how to work on ourselves  or offer spiritual processes or practices that can help us transform. ( I was told I should pray but never instructed how). Also, there tends to be an insufficient appreciation of the  value of psychotherapy in helping us work through our emotional difficulties.(If we are still angry and unresolved with our ‘personal father’, this will be projected onto God the Father!) Further, there is still too great an attachment to patriarchal values and an insufficient appreciation of the  many qualities of the Divine Feminine which is  currently doing Her very best to ‘return from the Shadows’ where She has   for so long been banished! Also, there is insufficient emphasis on the importance of working through our dark or our shadow side.(Fundamentalists in particular  love to project their own inner ‘devils’ onto everyone else around them.) Indeed, I believe that much of the evil and destructiveness   that we see around us and  which  indirectly leads to war and conflict, is a spill-over from our own repressed dark side. And lastly, we are not sufficiently instructed in the importance of seeking out the presence of  enlightened Spiritual Masters, that is,  Christed men and women who are much more awakened than ourselves and whose higher vibrational essence  can serve  powerfully to speed up our own evolutionary tempo.
 
What I think we need to understand, however,  is  how different the spiritual climate is  today to that which existed even fifty years ago. Indeed, today we are living at a time where, in contradiction to our epidemic of soullessness, a whole new renaissance of soul  is also  taking place. And  in every country on the planet. This in turn, makes it much easier for us to connect   to our divine self. Indeed,  I would say that the  main impulse today behind much of our ‘spiritual seeking’  and ‘serving our planet’, comes from our living within the field of this new zeitgeist. One might suggest that  the urgency of our times has evoked a  kind of ‘rescue mission’ on the part of those  more highly evolved beings in the invisible worlds, who are consequently drawing closer to us to help us.  And this makes it much easier for us  to ‘open up’ our hearts and grow our soul life without necessarily being part of a religion.

 

Speaking as someone who has been on an ‘eclectic path’ for most of his life, I have, over the years, sought to draw wisdom from many different  religious sources as well as  from sources that are not religious at all.  For example,  I have learned about reverencing the Earth from the Native traditions, emptiness and mindfulness from the Buddhists, prayer from the Masters and Heartfulness from the  Christian Mystics. I am happy to do Jesus talk with Christians or Buddha talk with Buddhists without  either being a Christian or a Buddhist or seeing any conflict. (The new spirituality, I believe, needs to reflect a greater convergence of East and West.) Also, having for a long time  studied with a Sufi group (mystical Islam), I am aware of the deep wisdom of the great  Sufi Masters. I am therefore not anti religion (which I don’t think is healthy) so much as  pro spirituality, and  I will always be open to feed myself delicious spiritual titbits wherever I discover them. Metaphorically speaking, my path involves  my buzzing around many  different sweet-smelling  sacred flowers and seeking to extract the necessary  nectar that I feel I require for  the different stages of my  spiritual journey at any particular time.  And if I can be described as ‘spiritually promiscuous’, then I celebrate it.  I suggest that this might also be your path as well. If so, go for it wholeheartedly!