It was one summer and I was one of the group facilitators at a personal growth holiday on a Greek island. In this collective community, people ate, socialized and took group workshops and courses together. I was giving a therapy workshop and running an early morning meditation. It was going well and people seemed to think I had something to offer. One lunchtime we were sitting around digesting our delicious food and sipping tea when one of the group members asked me, “How do you become happy?” “Aw, you’re not still trying to do that are you?” I remarked sardonically. The questioner withered and onlookers murmured their admiration; one or two told me later that they thought I was “spiritually advanced”. But the truth was that I was jaded about happiness. So to defend myself, I acted as if it was beneath me. I took more pride in the struggle, the application of effort and the ordeal. In a way I had gone from wanting happiness to boycotting it and by a kind of emotional logic it seemed to be a real place that I had arrived in. What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t the end. All my life I had made advances and arrived somewhere and thought to myself, “Oh, I get it, this is it; this must be it.” But of course it never is, because there’s always further to go. That’s how it was with happiness, I found out later when, stumbling in the darkness where all the best discoveries are made, I encountered happiness in an entirely new way. This time it wasn’t the focus, the goal or even the intention. This time it was merely a side-effect, a perk—it arose in an unexpected manner, expansive and unassailable, when I remembered happiness..

So, I am going to tell you how to be happy. Really happy or genuinely happy…not pretends happy. There are three rules or attitudes to remember and practice. Practice is the key element here. It is not and never is enough to know, to collect knowledge and become clever. Real intelligence is recognizing the need to practice, what to practice and how to practice it. These are the three principles:

The First Principle is Love
The Second Principle is Forgive
The Third Principle is Accept

The First Principle is Love

We are usually unaware of our mood or temper, even less aware of our habitual state of mind and oblivious to our customary emotions and behavior. This principle begins with a new practice that doesn’t even challenge the status quo. It begins where you want to be – happy. I want you to cultivate the disposition of love. You are used to a disposition of irritation, of frustration or hurt or anger or sadness or depression. Now whatever your previous disposition was, replace it with the disposition of love. This means that your prevailing tendency, your mood and your temperamental makeup will from now on become one of warmth, kindness and consideration, inclining toward your fellow human beings with tolerance and generosity. And not only to them, but to all other sentient beings as well as inanimate objects and all events and circumstances. You become gentler with yourself, more inclined towards reconciliation and forgiveness (which is the second principle).

Here is the exercise to start you off. First imagine love extending to those closest to you. The easiest ones for you to love include your family, children, husband, wife, partner, boy/girlfriend, mother, father, relatives, work colleagues and special friends.

Then extend this love feeling into your slightly more distant acquaintances. Using your life activities as a guide, bring more and more people to mind as you extend the field further and further outward toward people to whom you are only tacitly connected, but who nonetheless feature in your life.

Now what begins to come to light is that you see that some people are harder for you to love than others and it is these ones you are now going to concentrate on.

Dismiss negative thoughts about these people. They are the real challenge for you. For it is these people who will enable you to increase the feeling of love in you. Increasing your inner experience of love allows you to expand and extend your heart—and this is the important part—the love you extend to them will return to you.

Now you are beginning to create a reciprocal circle of love, persist in the disposition of love and, everyday, be mindful of the positive benefits to your well-being, your health and your happiness.

The Second Principle is Forgive

Not forgiving hurts you the most. It causes you far more pain than it causes anyone else. You are suffering. Consider it; you harbor resentment, bitterness, blame and unforgiveness in your heart the whole time, while the one you blame hardly thinks of you at all and gets off scot-free! While you suffer 24/7.

Now here’s the serious part: why do you do it? As you work down through the layers you find the one absolutely clear and resonant reason shamefully, guiltily reveals itself by crawling out of your unconsciousness like an oily shmoo; it is that resentment is the raw material of the self – to maintain the separate, divisive, unforgiving model of the individual entity you are creating and identifying with, you must feel angry about something or someone…all the time.

The simplest, most effective method to start forgiveness as a daily practice is to hold the person you want to forgive in your heart. Let them be there as often as you can and don’t waver. The more reasons that are presented by your judgment, criticism and blame for throwing them out of your heart, the more firmly you keep them there. Let them simply melt in your heart, because they’re not really what this is all about anyway. What this is really about is your need to suffer (remember?) and preserve your individual sense of self. And you have finished with this foolishness now…and forever. So hold all the life events, relationships, wrong-doings, resentful acts and unfairness you can think of in your heart and over time you will not only release the unforgiven, you will find that you are free.

Now you are beginning to create a reciprocal circle of forgiveness, persist in holding people, events and relationships in your heart and melting them with profound acceptance and, everyday, be mindful of the positive benefits to your well-being, your health and your happiness.

The Third Principle is Accept

Acceptance is one of the most powerful principles for inner well-being. Acceptance in the psycho-spiritual sense is often misunderstood. It does not imply in any way condoning, approving, even tacitly, or supporting wrong-doing, immorality or downright evil deeds. That is about libertarianism and the granting of license, a sort of anything goes mentality. No, acceptance in the sense in which it is meant in the third principle for happiness is the attitude that somehow everything fundamentally is unfolding as it should, in a way which we might be unable to understand. Also implied is that our attitude and meeting of events in openness, receptivity and an underlying wisdom which receives the mystery of life, our ability to be with the unknown, with uncertainty to not have to prescribe and anticipate life events constantly. We know in this wisdom that life is somehow fundamentally good. And it is; even the worst events turn out to reveal some beauty of soul and spirit in both individual and collective humanity. We only have to look at the very worst examples of human suffering to see that the light of truth shines, if anything, ever more brightly in troubled times of despair and darkness. The eclipse of love is only a period before the light bursts through and shines again.

Let us now turn to the all-essential practice. Start with your breath and relax. Then slowly and gradually become aware of everything in, out and about you—emotionally, physically, mentally, energetically, spiritually, inwardly and outwardly…sounds, tastes, smells, touch, what you see with eyes open or shut…be aware of it all and accept it…and accepting it, means not wishing it to be other than it is at present, right now…not regarding it with a sense of lack, or progression, or future orientation, or criticism, evaluation or judgment. Allowing everything inside and outside and around you and in your expanded field of concern and relationship to be alright just as it is.

Now you are beginning to create a reciprocal circle of acceptance, persist in holding people, events and relationships in your heart and melting them with profound acceptance and, everyday, be mindful of the positive benefits to your well-being, your health and your happiness.

The practice of happiness is profound and crucial; its worth immeasurable. So devote thirty minutes at the beginning and the end of your days to these three practices (ten minutes each). After a month you may decrease the time you spend practicing the three principles of happiness, if you wish. But you might find you enjoy them too much to stop. In any case the effects after a month will be significant and the practice will continue in your heart and mind even if you stop…with surprising results over time.

BLOG entry #145

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘How To Be Happy: The Three Principles’ was first published in 2012.

There is a saying: “Ecstasy is the meal, service is the offering.” When we reach this stage in the sacred journey, we discover our bliss. We sit in being-ness and experience the ecstasy of existence. The response is devotion and it arises out of gratitude, out of compassion, out of love and the flowering of our humanness.

You feel compelled to make an offering and the offering is service to the Divine. You are no longer separate from existence, so you serve existence. You find your purpose and fulfilment in your surrender to the Divine will and in service to Life. That is the fulfilment of the penultimate spiritual stage, the return to the Source. The suffering and the joy of others become your own. You are no longer removed from life in separateness. Your path is the path of return.

Ramakrishna, who followed many religious paths to fulfilment, described the sacred journey like this:

“There are three different paths to reach the Highest: the path of I, the path of Thou, and the path of Thou and I. According to the first, all that is, was, or ever shall be is I, my higher Self. In other words, I am, I was, and I shall be forever in Eternity. According to the second, Thou art, O Lord, and all is Thine. And according to the third, Thou art the Lord, and I am Thy servant, or Thy son. In the perfection of any of these three ways, a man will find God.”

Each of these ways is a spiritual path but only one transcends the illusion of separateness altogether and that is the first: “the path of I.” Nothing less than the transcendence of this final illusion, namely the manifestation of opposites, is required for entry into the kingdom. It is the release not only from false identity, but also from identity itself. As the ancient Vedas describe it: TAT TVAM ASI—that thou art. In other words the “I” inside me is what I really am. The realisation of this is beyond duality.

Here is a passage from my personal notebooks:

“My struggle against God had been long and hard. I had always maintained my will strongly against the Divine Will and, begrudgingly and ironically, I knew I was doomed. I had a vision of my death: I was in a forest and it was night. I was walking towards a house brightly lit from within. I looked through the window then entered through the front door. His figure was awe-inspiring—a huge swaggering Samurai in full armour and helmet with a giant sword. I pulled out my own sword, tiny in comparison, and we began a fierce fight that lasted some time, until I became increasingly exhausted. I realised this Samurai was playing with me. He could kill me at any time. Smarting from the futility of it all, I renewed my attack on him. With a mighty thrust he delivered a fatal blow and I fell…I was pure consciousness, no body, no self—nothing but consciousness—drifting serenely in space. A long way ahead was an object I couldn’t yet see. As I came closer, I saw that the object was a goblet, a chalice, which tilted towards me and poured sparkling, glinting water into my being. In that moment I knew that death was the same as life. I knew that nothing had changed. The cosmic joke was this: death and life were the same and life was everlasting.”

[Excerpt adapted from The Flight of Consciousness, Richard Harvey, Ashgrove Publishing 2002]

BLOG entry #144

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Three Different Paths’ was first published in 2012.

A senior citizen was driving down the freeway when his car phone rang. He picked it up and heard his wife's urgent voice warning him, “Victor, I just heard on the news there’s a car going the wrong way on 280. Please be careful!”

“Heck,” said Victor, “It's not just one car. There’s hundreds of ‘em!”

Writing is often one-way traffic, like filling a holey bucket, like shouting in the wind: all putting out with no give-back, no return. Let’s change that here and now. I want to talk to the oldies among the Spiritual Guidance audience; the over fifties, the ones looking at the three sights of the Buddha—old age, disease and death—squarely in the eye, up close. And I want to talk to the younger folk who care for the oldies or have older people, family members, neighbors and so on in their lives.

I want to ask for your response: please send it to me at [email protected] — you see, now you know I’m serious.

With old age, as with all the various stages of life, comes a challenge. Three possibilities are apparent. I describe them this way:

One, I pull back and become an observer of life’s drama and mundaneness. Passion and intensity surround me, but it is for the previous generations, the younger ones with hubris who have hope, desire, urgency and ambition, who still require satisfaction, who are hungry for life. They are what the poet Rilke called “the hot and quick”, whereas I am the cold and slow.

Two, I retreat into a fixed stance, embellished by the appearance of age, becoming crotchety, mean and small-minded. Inside I feel compulsively intolerant, judgmental and critical. Mostly people do it “wrong” and I suffer from my disappointment in them and my lack of generosity. The dynamic is primarily inward, but I may express it outwardly. People stay away from me. Increasingly I am not someone others want to be around, but they do so out of duty, responsibility, family ties and…(dreaded word) pity.

Three, I accept the grace of old age, the wisdom of life experience and the generosity of existence, as a being who gives back and serves in teaching the young (increasingly everybody else!) through loving acceptance, compassion and empathy, through generosity and demonstrating the power of grace—the grace of a life well-lived and a life that continues to flourish and unfold intelligently with feeling, engagement and loving kindness, a life that naturally and beautifully has led me to a deepening spiritual threshold.

So, in summary you have the observer, the judge and the wise one.

Now, which do you choose? What is your experience? Are there any other possibilities to choose? Have you chosen one of them? What of the issues I haven’t mentioned here: ethics, health, crime, physical frailty, discrimination, employment, creativity, cultural expectation, prejudice and dependency?

Please share generously with me; anecdotes, personal reminiscences, wisdom, humor, tales of caring and of being cared for, glorious senility, pathos, compassion, ailments and love. I will try over time to assemble these into an article or even a book (asking your permission to share first, of course). I promise you I will appreciate it and I will not feel like I’m shouting in the wind. Thank you. May your journey through life be gracious, intelligent and wise.

Three ladies were discussing the difficulties of old age. One said, “Sometimes I catch myself with a jar of mayonnaise in my hand, standing in front of the refrigerator and I can’t remember whether I need to put it away or start making a sandwich.”

The second lady said, “Yes, sometimes I find myself on the landing of the stairs and I can’t remember whether I’m on my way up or on my way down.”

The third one said, “Well, ladies, I’m glad I don't have that problem. Knock on wood,” as she rapped her knuckles on the table, and jumping up cried, “That must be the door, I’ll get it!”

BLOG entry #143

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘The Grace of Old Age’ was first published in 2012.

Women experience a special problem about working with self-worth and it is what Jung sometimes called “animus possession.” Because we are deeply—most of us blindly—immersed in a patriarchal society, we have an egoic mask which is governed by patriarchal symbols and which supports the values of the patriarchy. This mask totally subdues a woman’s true nature. So she has to find a way to remove the mask, because it is completely false and it denies her womanhood and the deep values of the feminine.

As the patriarchy has flourished and established itself as our predominant culture, so its principles and values have become embedded in our psyches. This aspect of the inner world of both men and women has been named the patripsych. The patripsych upholds unconsciously the values of the patriarchy. While this poses a deep challenge for men, it is a distinctly different problem for women.

A woman’s conditioning is so imbued with male values that her ego structure relates exclusively to a male system and does not resonate with her natural female self. What makes this so difficult to work with is its near invisibility—not really seeing it, not knowing it, not thinking there is anything wrong with it, because there is rarely any alternative to having to adapt to it. You can feel the pressure from the evolution of several thousand years of patriarchy. So the difference for a woman is that as soon as you start to peel away the layers, very soon what appears is an infantile layer of stunted growth that is everything-that-pleases-daddy. This is her deep conformity to the male value system. When that has been shed there is this little seed or undeveloped impulse that is the tiny, unformed ego of her own femaleness that longs to be developed as womanly qualities. Through those qualities a woman can re-engage with the world in an entirely new way. With the patriarchal mask discarded she is free to be herself in a way that is not constricted by patriarchal norms.

Men have to strip away their identification with the negative values of patriarchy too, because a man’s real potential lies deeper. So, for men, developing genuine self-worth is more of a humbling practice. When women do their inner work they get bigger, more visible, more noisy and less civilised—more obviously free—whereas men become deeper and more humble. It is a different direction, but for men as well as for women, the issue is how much the patriarchy is within you, unquestioned and inviolable.

If you are a woman who entered into the man’s world with a career you have even more to handle from the point of view of your inner life. You are in a man’s world anyway and you cannot get out of it—no one should kid himself or herself that they are not in it. However, if you have gone into it in a masculine role you are likely to be even more deeply submerged. The higher you have risen in the hierarchy of the man’s world the more subsumed in it you are.

Do you know the story of the Greek goddess Athena? She was born out of a male version of a Caesarean section. While the god of heaven and earth, her father Zeus, screamed in agony, Hephaestus, the god of the forge, cut open his head with an axe. Out of the wound Athena was born, wearing full armour and brandishing weapons. She considered herself to have only one parent—her father Zeus. When you get a successful woman who is “straight out of her daddy’s head,” you can see she is functioning like a man – not like a woman—in a man’s world. It is absurd to say that this says anything positive about the equality of women or feminist values, because it is more antithetical to women and the women’s movement than if a man held the job.

Exploring the tension between male and female values leads you to another schism—the division between inner and outer. The repression of the in-turning, feminine principle by the outgoing, masculine principle is reflected in the history of war, conquest and gynocide. When you get those dreams with a male figure who is oppressive and who is after you, there is the patriarchy and the oppressive masculine ego inside you saying, “No, little girl!” That is the fear, the patriarchy personified and deeply internalised.

[Excerpted adapted from The Flight of Consciousness, Richard Harvey, Ashgrove Publishing 2002, http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004WC4YQI]

BLOG entry #142

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Animus Possession’ was first published in 2012.

Our world today is in crisis. The outward crisis is expressed spectacularly in war, genocide, victimization, bigotry and prejudice, intolerance and cruelty, escalating around the world internationally and domestically, ecological disasters current or looming, global economic crisis, scarce resources and the ubiquitous exploitation of humans, animals and the planet.

The inner crisis is less apparent to the human eye. But to the person who looks carefully it is even more important, and it is more vital that, as the source of the outward, hellish expressions of suffering, we do something about it. Only human beings can avert the imminent crisis, through real inner change producing an inner psychological, spiritual revolution, through feeling and showing a sense of respect, honor and reverence toward the world.

The sacred life must return to our world now and sacredness begins inside. There is no short cut, no quick way—the way is to cultivate awareness and consciousness in human beings. People must learn that their every action, thought, desire, fear, feeling and emotion is directly related to the outward state of the world, because being precedes doing and the world today is a direct outcome of humankind’s unconscious state.

If inner work—the sacred way of inner respect, honoring and reverence—is not embraced by many and, over time, the majority of humankind, the imminent crisis is certain to fulfill itself in ways we hardly need to imagine, since they are all too obvious. If, however, inner work is adopted as standard, shepherding us through thresholds of maturation, reflecting and cultivating our inner wisdom and that of our children and our children’s children, then the crisis will surely be averted. A spiritual revolution of consciousness will propel humanity to the heart center of kindness, love and compassion and through the abiding, profound, natural impulse toward peace, consciousness, joy and the divine.

A community of human souls intent on attaining inner freedom, practicing compassion and responding to spiritual and divine longing is an appropriate and direct response to the demands of the present time. Be proud of your inner work in whatever discipline or practice you have adopted or practice it, be tolerant of other’s beliefs, cooperate with others rather than stand alone in your egoity and, above all, practice compassion in action to all, without discrimination.

Human potential, global awareness and spiritual consciousness are related so closely and bound so tightly together that there is hardly any difference between them. They are simply all consciousness and consciousness is what as human beings we have to awaken to.

BLOG entry #141

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘The Sacred Life Must Return’ was first published in 2012.