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8/9/01

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MOLLER
Dear Friends,

Herewith an article which I recently submitted for publication in one
of our local New Age magazines. Hope you find some resonance.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL PATH

By: Moller de la Rouviere

August 2001.

Most of us who approach the spiritual path do so in the sincere, but
very often rather naive belief that we are directing our attention and
efforts towards the deeper, hidden aspects of life and that our search
will sooner or later, reveal the mysteries and fragrance of what we
generally have come to believe to be the Spiritual Path.

We search for a path, a way of life or even a way of modifying our
behaviour hoping that by putting our energy and care into such a
practice will in time bring about a fundamental change to the limited
and fragmented vision we have of ourselves, others around us and life
in general. We believe that spirituality will in time enter into our
lives and bring in its wake a sense of freedom, beauty, integrity and
wholeness to our being. In this way spirituality is projected as
something which will be added to who or what we perceive ourselves to
be and which will enrich our lives and fulfill the promise we have
projected into it. All we have to do is to follow the meditative and
contemplative instructions of the path we have entered upon, add to
this a few outward behavioural modifications, and the results will be
more or less guaranteed.

We seldom ask ourselves what relation such a path might have to the
complexities and confusions which generally form the functional basis
of our lives. In this way we take the spiritual path to be something
we may add to our present confusion, and that over time the inner
turmoil will simply disappear as a result of our practice. But such a
view is fraught with danger and empty promise.

The spiritual way of life demands that we enter into a profound
enquiry about our human condition as a whole. We cannot isolate our
practice from the total context of our lives and expect such a
practice to create the subtle space necessary for the revelation of
our true spiritual character. To leave one area of our lives
unattended and un-transcended will inevitably result in the status
quo by which we remain dominated and controlled by these uninspected,
and very real fabrications of mind.

In truth, the Spiritual path has little to do with Spirituality, and
much to do with that which OBSCURES Spirituality. In other words, the
spiritual path demands the participation of our ENTIRE being in the
process of transforming, or translating our fragmented and separate
vision to a life free from the burden of everything which inhibits the
inherent beauty and freedom which is the true ground of our BE-ing.
From this perspective the spiritual path is not something we enter
upon and ADD to our existence in the hope that it will miraculously
free us from the limitations we ourselves bring to our living reality
, but rather a profound and direct investigation into the nature,
function and process of exactly these limitations themselves.

We ARE our limitations. We ARE the fragmentated existence. We ARE
all the complications we find within ourselves. Ordinary human life
is beset by contradictory and conflicting desires, hopes, moral codes,
thinking processes, impulses and attitudes. So to believe that by
adding to this confusion a form of spiritual practice which does not
address these obstacles to the spiritual healing process in a most
direct way, is to have a rather superficial and immature approach to
the question of spirituality. For the spiritual to reveal itself, we
need to create inner space and clarity. The subtlety and beauty of
that wholeness of BE-ing in which we already inhere cannot manifest
through an instrument of confusion, complication and fragmentation.
And our ENTIRE uninspected life and being IS this instrument. It IS
the mirror, (which is nothing other than our very selves), which needs
to be wiped clean if our lives were even to begin to reflect the truth
and beauty we so ardently believe we are searching for.

In this way we may then begin to appreciate in a direct and most
fundamental way the important link between the inner world of our
psychology with all its hidden and overt complexities, and the natural
ease of a life free from our identification with this world.
Spirituality is a natural by-product of a mind and being in a state of
relative ease and peace with itself - simply because it is no longer
interested in that which brings complications and suffering to our
being. As a natural BY-PRODUCT of inner clarity and openness,
Spirituality does not clear away our confusion. Spirituality enters
when confusion is no more. It is the task of the spiritual PATH AND
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE to remove the darkness and to clear the ground.
Once it has done this work, and the ground has been cleared, freedom
and wholeness will reveal themselves simply as our natural
disposition.

Now if it were possible to isolate and identify one aspect of our
un-free being as that area of our lives where most of the obscuration
of our spirituality takes place, we may not have to look much further
than our inner psychological world. It is in the arena of our
profound identification with this psychological being where we live
and breathe the confusion and complexities which so effectively
convince us of our limitation and which so profoundly alienates us
from the Spiritual Ground of our BE-ing.

Whatever we therefore perceive our spiritual path to be, if it does
not directly address the question of psychology and our identification
with it, we may have blissful experiences, profound insights, times of
great silence, ease and clarity, moments of Samadhic absorbtion,
visions of lights and sounds, experiences of spontaneous bodily
movements and other Kriyas and so on, but our lives will continue to
reveal the domination of our psychology over the entire field of our
human function. We cannot BY-PASS that which we are profoundly
identified with. We may temporarily suspend it through experiences of
quietness during meditation, or by using drugs or some special
technique for quieting the rambling noises of the mind. But that
which. we have not addressed, inspected and transcended will continue
to control and dominate us, despite our most sincere involvement in
what we believe to be our spiritual path.

In its most fundamental function, our psychological being experiences
itself as centred around the nucleus of the 'I'. This 'I' may be
weakly or strongly developed, relatively balanced or greatly
disturbed, but all psychology refers both outwardly and inwardly
towards objects and experiences, inner states of thought, feelings and
emotions via this thing we refer to as 'I' 'me' and 'myself'. And
this self has as its content all the experiences, conscious or
unconscious, we have encountered throughout our lives. But the self
is not just a neutral memory bank of recorded past experiences. It
includes and brings to the living moment all the emotional and
unresolved complications which were associated with these past
experiences at the time when they happened. However rationalised,
justified or harmonised and integrated into our being, the net result
of allowing these past emotional memories to surface everytime we are
interacting with ordinary life's situations leaves us with a rather
confused, alienated and fragmented response to the challenges of daily
living.

We generally find it difficult to look at life and the living moment
as an ongoing process of ever-new experience. We tend to bring the
entire grid of our spychological complexities to bear on the present
moment and translate what we experience not practically ansd
reasonably into our world of objective understanding, but relate to
things from the complexity of our emotional HISTORY. And being
identified with this history, rather than with a clear and unbiased
mind, we suffer and enjoy the consequences of this activity in an ever
downward spiral of what can only be described as a complexity of
psychological interference patterns. And it is these interference
patterns of psychological/emotional reactivity which form the most
marked and profound obscuration to the clarity of vision required for
the revelation of our Spirituality.

The Spiritual Path is transformative. If our intention is genuine,
and if our practice is not motivated by the lure of short-term gain
and superficial release from some of our more obvious disturbances and
emotional diseases, then the Spiritual path will bring changes of
attitude, understanding, involvement with both inner and outer
experiences, and finally cannot but bring about the restoration of our
human dignity and a loving and generous disposition towards life in
general.

And from this it may be clear that unless we address the obstacles we
ourselves bring to the living moment, and find ways of understanding
and practice which will reduce the complexities our psychological
being brings to our lives, our dream of spirituality will remain just
that - a dream. The momentum of the life-negative force of our
un-enlightened state is very powerful. It has controlled, limited
and fragmented human existence for many thousands of years. Mainly
because we have never really been sensitised to our own involvement in
the way in which we actively participate in the drama of our daily
suffering.

We have been given answers by those we have trusted. But these answers
have failed us. Religion and philosophy are based on the same
uninspected principle of defence against the mystery of our human
suffering. Both have sought answers without inspecting the source of
the dilemma it is trying to solve. So perhaps the time has come for us
to wake up to the fact that there is NO answer to the human dilemma
of unhappiness, fragmentedness, alienation, loneliness and suffering
other than the rather arduous path of self-enquiry and self-knowledge.
Such an investigation will bring us to the understanding and
transcendence of that which WE OURSELVES bring to the living moment
which frustrates and conceals the simplicity, dignity and inherent
wholeness of our human condition.

In this lies our only hope.

Your brother in the Dharma.

Moller.





DOC HOBBES (TIM HARRIS)


You like that eh? I enjoy doing them... like a release if you know what I
mean... look at it this way. Karma is a problem when it comes to the
exploitation of the masses. Thus, groups of professionals get together and
protect one another. Liberals/Conservatives, Republicans/Democrats...
whatever the teams may be... how do they do that?

Have you ever played the game 'Go' (it is chinese or japenese in origin --
two stories) the object is to surround your opponents while capturing
territory.

Anyway, the reverse works the same when trying to cover up karmic events.
Surround the karmic generator(s) (bad guy) with a mix of so-called good guys
and bad guys. The karmic gereator(s) are protected in exchange for advancing
agendas that are contrary to the people.

Like stem cell research... the only reason we are hearing about it now is
because there has been success. Problem is, as far as stem cell research
goes in addition to cloning, it kind of throws the whole idea of DNA
evidence out the window. A new tool for setting up the innocent. Do you know
how easy it is to get a dna sample?

Karmic adjustment then comes by identifying the karmic generators and
'setting them off with the truth' which is above discussion because they
know they have been caught. Regardless of the remainder of this life it
becomes a karmic timebomb with a huge domino effect.

>They remind me of that complaint generator
>program. :-)

lol... I am not complaining though. Just telling the truth... it is all that
is required in these times.

>And I chuckle all the way through. :-)

I wish we could say the same for all the readership.

>
>Praise to the complainers! :-)

Long live the 'house keepers'!

>
>


Oh... btw.. I meant 'National Defence' and further, I do not necessarily
mean 'government'...

oh... btw 2... I am not against governments in any form. The systems do
work... it is the people that do not... just like 7 councillors having
$11,000 expense reports (crazy that they were all the same eh?) but we can
not afford to place a Welcome to Downtown Cranbrook sign to advertise the
downtown area... they don't have any money for DT improvement... they voted
no to that... well that is not exactly correct... they promised a sign to
them at the DTMA meeting for June.

What time is it?

o
-- hobbes; 0,0,0,0:00.00 Nao

The process of 'thinking' is a comparison/negation of what you do not know
as it relates to what you do know creating a natural erosion of the purity
of the moment.

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