An often neglected but potent underlying cause of distress and imbalance in life is time. Time is an ephemeral concept, but it is also a hard fact that impinges on our lives in a ubiquitous way. To know this and do nothing about it invites all kinds of difficulties.

How often have we heard in our own or another's life the complaint that there's just not enough time, or in relationship: "You don't have enough time for me," or in families: "You never spend time playing with the children," or at work: "You must do more and spend longer hours to earn more and achieve more. Be diligent!"

Everything takes time. If you want to do something well, it takes longer. If you want to cut corners it doesn't pay, because it's a job done badly.

Symbolic time is everywhere: in the man-made world -- watches, clocks, clock towers, neon hoardings with time readouts, phones with digital readouts, time on your PC, on the TV, DVDs and CDs showing lengths of time; and in the natural world -- morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night -- our world is peppered with reminders of time.

Reminders, reminders! Must do (if there's enough time), didn't get to the bank (because there wasn't enough time), will get it done (if I find the time). This imaginary and yet factual lack of time (how can we lack time when all we have is time?) causes us stress, contraction, nervousness, fearfulness, illness, irritation and neurosis.

But time is an adversary that we will eventually and inevitably succumb to, when we finally run out of it at the end of our lives.

So, while we are still here let's take it seriously -- very seriously. This is my advice and it comes dearly-won through the deep consideration of not only my own, but many other people's difficulties with this perennial, insidious issue.

In a disciplined way, divide your waking life into a three-way split. Your waking life consists of approximately sixteen hours a day (the other 8 should be devoted to sleep). Consider how you spend this time. You only have so many hours in the day, over a year, for the rest of your life. So, use them wisely, spend them sanely and let them bring balance into your life.

Divide it like this:

1. Time for yourself: time with and for oneself is essential for inner well-being. It balances and cultivates peace and tranquility, and returns you to a sense of being. It reminds you to care about yourself and puts you in touch with yourself, your body, mind, feelings, emotions, life trajectory, life assessment, your energy. In fact there is so much to keep in touch with that it is only the foolish man or woman who would ignore it. Hardly anyone honors time with themselves anything like enough, but you can by taking yourself seriously and realizing that without this essential exercise for your well-being, self-esteem and happiness, every interaction, encounter and relationship you have in the outer world is fundamentally flawed. You will relate to the world, to others and deal with life's circumstances far better if you first take time with yourself, to attend to yourself and your soul needs, and become aware of your inner needs and desires, your deep innate need to attend to yourself.

2. Time for others: everyone has a relationship, interrelationships, interdependence, others in their life. We must attend to these relationships which give us the opportunity to care about someone, something and some other than ourselves. So we have to allot the correct amount of time to this pursuit. Caring involves depth, but prior to that it involves time. Simply taking time to be together with someone communicates to them that they are important and worthy of your time. Doing things for others out of genuine consideration is good for our souls, spending time with them and allowing our self-concern to drop away refreshes the spirit. A life without love is a life full of sorrow. So prize this opportunity because it is precious -- one of the most precious aspects of life that there is, and honor it.

3. Finally, duty and responsibility: we all must eat! There is a Zen saying: "No work. No food." It holds true of course and we know instinctively, intuitively the rightness of this adage. To work for our keep, not just for things to make us comfortable, but for the soul food it provides us with, to work and become absorbed in activity, to work and be lost in industry and action is good for the inner life and inner well-being. Our physical bodies are built to move and strive, stretch and carry; our minds to create and problem-solve and our feelings and emotions to be engaged, strong and passionate about what we do. We should spend a third of our waking life in work, which is why it is so important that we become aware of our soul purpose - of what we should be doing.

Please consider the three-way split of time. Then, if it appeals to you, begin by becoming aware of how you divide your time already. Then, gradually bring it into balance and watch the transformation in your life.

BLOG entry #135

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. ‘Time: The Three-Way Split for Balance and Well-Being’ was first published in 2011.

A lot of what passes for spiritual practice today is not really spiritual at all. It would hardly need remarking if it were something like the inversion of adjectives, such as bad meaning good, or get down meaning get up (and dance). But behind this devaluing is an insidious process of dilution and annihilation: the latter of grammar, the former of true spirituality. The erosion of grammar is arguably heinous, but the destruction of the spiritual is catastrophic. If we lose sight of the road, we may never reach our destination. Similarly, if we cannot recognize authentic spirituality, we lose the way back to ourselves and are truly lost.

One basic fundamental principle of spirituality is so unpopular today as to be almost completely ignored. It is that human incarnation offers us the opportunity to realize ourselves as spiritual beings. Individual self-interest, self-aggrandizement and self-importance are of interest to materialists and egoists only. A genuine spiritual event takes place in the absence of a sense of individual identity.

Only when you are absent is the numinous present. You can talk with God all you like, communicate via letters (emails?), poems, music and other art forms. But ultimately no communication is possible between two who are one, or another way to put it is that communication exists only between two separate individual entities. God is not an entity; God is more truly yourself than you are! Therefore, you have no need of speaking with God. What you do need is to rid yourself of selfhood, ego, self-contraction, the individual, separative “I”, which is what Buddha called suffering. You do this by losing yourself in God, immersing yourself in God, surrendering to God until all you see is God, because everything is God.

In the Seventies you could buy posters that at first sight appeared to be a lot of squiggly lines on a page. The trick was to defocus and perhaps look a little obliquely at the poster. Something would happen in your brain, sometimes quite perceivable experientially. The lines would realign themselves into fish or people or flowers. Then you realized that forms and formlessness exist together in parallel modes of perception: the way you saw things was simply a way and not the way. The method was defocusing, without that you had only the squiggles.

The method for entry into the spiritual realm is similar to perceiving the poster. In one sense you must defocus…or really focus. Either way, the price of admission to spiritual reality is your self. When you trick the ego, the separate small self that masquerades as you, into loosening its hold on your perception you “fall through” into reality, into eternity, into the truly spiritual and, beyond the squiggles of selfhood and suffering, you see God.

When this truly happens, no one is there. No one is present, there is only Presence. No one has experiences of the spiritual, there is only experience, or it would be closer to say only there is! In a sense all of this is obvious when you think about it. Because the spiritual pursuit—meditation, self-enquiry, mystical movement, reading scriptures for inspiration, intuition, ACIM, zazen, dervish whirling—you are doing is designed to release you from the dualistic world, in which your individual separateness struggles with ultimate reality, resisting, fighting, denying, bargaining, despairing about it all and inevitably retiring for a rest in the narrow, warming, comforting confines of egocentric pleasures.

The pleasures of so-called “spirituality”, are many and varied: relaxation (sometimes very profound), pleasure (likewise), beatific moments of “spiritual” breakthrough and experience, emotionally exalted feelings of oneness with others, love (in whatever human, blissful, but usually separate form) and so on. But none of these are strictly spiritual. Why? Because spiritual means “not material”, “not temporal” or “incorporeal”. The world of the spirit is usually defined in contrast to what it is not.  But spirit, while indefinable semantically, is distinguishable from phenomena precisely because it is located in the absence of arising phenomena, temporal and conditional events and beings—and that's the point! Spirituality is of the noumena, of otherness, of God, by whatever name we know God. When God is, I am not.

In God we are met and subsumed not as a separate entity or some missing part. The divine epiphany is a profound and ecstatic homecoming that words can never describe and no concepts can ever explain. Coming home to God is returning to our Self, remembering, re-knowing, intuiting; coming back to Heart is the recognition of our True Self as all and everything, because there is no other in God, no divisible entities, nothing but a sudden leap of understanding that we have always been like this, always been here, always been perfectly safe and at rest, happy and peaceful, wise and blissful.

No experience, no insincere, superficial or misinformed spiritual practice could ever provide this realization of the truth.

BLOG entry #134

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. ‘When God Is, I Am Not’ was first published in 2011.

I have been a therapist for 30-odd (with all the double meaning that implies) years now. During that time I have seen many changes in people. I am sure you have too, but my work is geared to that human endeavor, so probably I, like other practitioners in the healing field, get to see more of it. The question arises often, "How do people change?" and "What is the process and what does it look and feel like?"

I don't know who first said it, but I have said it often since: Everything changes yet nothing has changed. Here is a summary of personal change in therapy. Let me say straight away that change is not only possible due to therapy, it is highly likely that when a person sees a therapist who is any good that it will occur, so long as they are motivated to bring it about.

This is an important first point: so long as they are motivated to bring it about, because most of us have an internal saboteur. This is a sub-personality who stands up for the status quo, for not rocking the boat, who cries "Be careful! Watch out!", as well as "It's not going to work, don't be so gullible!" The saboteur expresses itself in cynicism, doubt, mistrust and irritation, as well as inner statements like "Don't get above yourself", "Who do you think you are?" and "Why should it work for you?" The pack mentality is sometimes all-powerful. The idea -- even the beginning of the idea -- of rising above the level of peer-group, family and friends is instinctively abhorrent to us. It seems to threaten our very survival. If you are not in touch with this, then get in touch with it. Racist, fatist, misogynistic, child-ist, physically-challenged prejudices are a collective, rather than purely personal, phenomena. This means that we must each of us take deep responsibility for prejudice and bigotry to bring about change.

The individual who has undergone change in the inner world is different from the rest. His or her transformation sets them apart because they are no longer a prey to conditioning, no longer acting out of emotional-behavioral patterns arising from early childhood training. In short, they are no longer conditioned.

So, we have an internal saboteur. What else? Well, there is ennui, a lazy part, an apathetic part, a child who thinks someone else should do it for him, a fearful part who doesn't want to threaten the marriage or the relationship, their career and so on. But alongside all of these, and often possessing immense resilience, strength and courage (and these are the qualities needed now) is the wayfarer, the seeker, the inner explorer or adept. This part of us deeply yearns for truth, for reality, for authenticity and a vibrant love-filled, passionate life.

So long as the seeker follows this part of them willingly and with dedication the process of inner work will lead to personal change.

And what happens to the memories, to the abandonment, to the fears and insecurities, to the neurosis and impending psychosis -- the madness of the inner life when we change? It is moved aside. It remains, but like a photograph album you can take it out and look if you choose, but it doesn't waylay you anymore, or even vie for attention overmuch. It becomes a part of you that has died or left or been relegated to the past. And it doesn't have the emotion, the emotional charge that it used to have.

One more thing: Nothing that happened to us happened for no reason. Everything that happened has a positive side. The direct pursuit of that positive payoff is, in my view, a mistake, because it can lead to deepening levels of delusion about oneself. But when and if you get there, you will notice the metamorphosis of negative memories, however painful and damaging they may have appeared to you at the time you experienced them. It is perhaps the real meaning of the word miracle.

I consider Hermann Hesse's Magic Theatre at the end of his book Steppenwolf a most vivid and apt illustration of the maxim: Everything changes yet nothing has changed. The hero of the Hesse's book walks down a long corridor looking to left and right, opening the doors to rooms and as he does so he sees himself in various positions ands circumstances, reflecting hidden and repressed, but nonetheless real, sides of his inner self. The conclusion is this: inside us we participate in all the tendencies, from glorious to base, of the human condition. What separates us from those others who act out is choice.

BLOG entry #133

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. ‘Everything Changes Yet Nothing Has Changed’ was first published in 2011.

In about 5 billion years our sun is expected to die. Recently the Hubble Space Telescope, trained on the planetary nebula NGC 6210 about 6,500 light-years away, photographed a star, slightly less massive than our sun, suffering its last gasp.

A dying star forms a planetary nebula (really just gas and dust, but resembling a planet when seen from a great distance) when it ejects its outer layers. In its death throes a star throws off multiple shells, including electrons of platinum and gold, in irregular patterns. In what has become known as the last breath it leaves behind a tiny, extremely hot remnant called a white dwarf.

In an uncharacteristic parallel, romance meets empiricism, giving rise to the poetic and scientifically-correct image of gold as the last dying breath of a dying star -- its final fading expiration.

I don't know if a star breathes as such, but children (and I suppose adolescents) of the Sixties were prey to Joni Mitchell's opinion. She sung, "We are stardust. We are golden." Many didn't know any better, but had the Children of the Sixties been inspired to put the insights about prana in the yoga manuals of Ernest Wood and Richard Hittleman into practice, they would at least have realized that they breathed. The root of the word inspiration is "to breathe in" and this revealing connection opens up its inner significance and associations, as well as its potential for stimulating personal enlightenment in both the spiritual and the knowledgeable senses.

Because if inspiration -- that mysterious essence that visits us in life and promotes enthusiasm, meaningful action and connects heaven to the earth -- is as commonplace, ordinary, predictable and freely available, then why aren't we inspired all the time, or at least as frequently as when we breathe in?

As the ancient alchemists might have put it, the Philosopher's Stone of self-knowledge enables us to turn lead into gold, or our mundane humanness into our divine nature. In inner alchemy, for example, a key concept is the refinement of essential matter into vital breath and spirit. Taoists practice breath exercises, massage and martial arts towards this end with great commitment.

In New Age and pop psychology literature today we are often advised that our attitude dictates our commitment to our learning potential. It is manifested and expressed through our responses: glib, dismissive, doubtful, cynical, angry, resentful. Other ways to respond to statements of truth, or guidance are: strangely sad, filled with longing (some distant longing you cannot find words for), hesitant, hopeful, afraid, hurt, unforgiving, fixed or unyielding.

Like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the authoritative manual of nearly 1000 pages of diagnostic criteria used by mental health professionals and insurance companies, descriptions of disease and illness surpass descriptions of well-being. But spot the logic. Our attitude only produces a positive response when we become receptive, open and insightful. Yet there is a plethora of ways to sabotage this response and find our way into negativity.

And the logic is this. I am driving to London, England from York. The route is to take the A64 to the A1 then the M1 all the way. This is the route because it will get me there quickly, safely and more economically than any other route. However, if I take a wrong turn and take the M18 to Sheffield just past Doncaster, I will sustain a 20 mile or more detour, adding time, more danger and expense to my journey. If by mistake I take the M62 to Hull or stay on the A64 to Leeds the result is the same. There is really only one efficient route.

In another uncharacteristic parallel, inner work corresponds with outer life in amplifying and reflecting the fact that one way is right, while a multitude of wrong ways exist. Is it any wonder that so many are lost and seeking guidance?

"I don't know who I am/But you know life is for learning," sung Joni Mitchell in that stardust/golden song. Knowing who you are is the goal of personal enlightenment, as in "Who am I?" or "What is a human being?" The root meaning of enlightenment is wisdom, knowledge and there is even some connection to feathers. The word "drive" carries the curious meaning from the German of "pushing from behind", which is reminiscent of the Taoist concept of "leading from beneath".

In one ancient Taoist story a man is filled with the irrational fear that the sky would fall and destroy his home and family. A friend counseled him that heaven was everywhere and consisted of nothing but the air in which he walked and breathed, so how could anyone fear the collapse of heaven.

The fearful man replied that if the heavens were accumulated air, then wasn't there a danger of the stars falling. The friend replied that the stars were merely illuminated bodies of air, to which the fearful man replied, "What if the earth should sink beneath my feet?"

His friend replied that the earth was a solid mass filling space. "It is everywhere," he said, "because you can walk for the whole day and night on it without reaching its end, so how can you be afraid of its breaking up beneath your feet?" Apparently the fearful man experienced great relief in the explanation and began to live with confidence.

We are getting closer to a breathing universe with the friend identifying the planets as bodies of air and the earth leading from beneath. To tie in that correspondence let us just say that the ancient Taoists who used to say, "Look neither to left or right", got it right and moved on ahead suffering no distractions. Each time, according to one old story, they placed a foot on the earth they refused to take for granted the fact that there was stability and matter around their feet, so inspired to gratitude were they by the blessing of all they needed for their groundedness.

Perhaps they were inspired as often as they breathed out.

BLOG entry #132

One of the secrets of writing is that you can create a compelling argument for just about anything at all. Regardless of its logic, truthfulness or fact just about anything can be created as verification to justify a point of view or a manipulation of reality.

Clearly this has relevance to almost every subject under the sun. But nowhere is it more prevalent and proliferating than in the areas of spirituality and consciousness. Long the province of charlatans, mystics, scientists and religious zealots alike, the spiritual-consciousness field is peppered with half-truths and unprobed beliefs. Partly of necessity, because the traffic of meaning between the spiritual and the material realms is unreliable at best. But partly also because people like the truth to agree with them, to support them in their self-interest and they like to talk about the thing that interests them most: themselves.

The truth however is less partisan or preferential. It is really strictly speaking, at least spiritually, impersonal. Let's take a few popular, but nonetheless erroneous, beliefs from the Mind-Body-Spirit (a.k.a. the New Age) field and look critically at what they are really saying:

1. Only consciousness creates the world.

Everything is consciousness. It doesn't create anything, it already is everything that is, or is not. Both pre-manifestation and post-manifestation, emptiness and all possible potential. So consciousness does not create the world, it is self-sourcing, it is the real world!

2. There is a new spiritual teaching that enables people to rescue themselves and mankind.

People do not need rescuing, neither does mankind. Both need to see themselves for who and what they really are, then no rescue is needed or appropriate. The idea of a new spirituality that saves or rescues is a prime example of taking a relative theme like heroism and drama and converting into spiritual terms, even though it doesn't work, because it is not relevant.

3. Our belief in the fallacy of the existence of the objective physical reality that does not depend on consciousness is limiting.

The belief in existing objects is only limiting when we do not see the world as it truly is, a reflection of the absolute and all objects that arise in consciousness only. This gobbledy-gook is popular, perhaps stemming from the popular idea that maya equals illusion or that samsara is not Nirvana or whatever. Read more deeply into your own religion: maya is a relative reflection of the divine in the world of time and space.

4. Only the consciousness of a human being contains all elements of existence. The consciousness of a human being is the same undifferentiated consciousness that exists in, through and outside, and pervades all of existence and all existing objects of this and any other time. The great sages are levelers, they insult our arrogance and complacency. This consciousness that I arise within as an individuated form is exactly the same -- exactly the same -- as the consciousness of a dog or a stone -- why? Because there is only one consciousness.

5. Alter human consciousness because it includes all other elements; if a person were to use the knowledge, the world about us would change crucially.

Consciousness of a human being or anything else includes all elements. This already crucially influences the world; there is no need to instruct people in how to do this, merely help them to see what they are creating already!

6. Knowing how to reach harmonic development together with the universe enables us to have a healthier physical body and happier life, and the world will develop accordingly.

When a human being is over-concerned with health, happiness and harmony, they inevitably miss the larger point which is that the world, like human beings and everything else, arises and subsides in consciousness. Since all this, from the point of view of reality, i.e. where we really are, is happening simultaneously, spiritual evolution and harmonic development are strictly speaking merely relative terms with no real relevance to the spiritual, transcendent and divine. To play with the incidence of synchronicity and convergence for the sake of self-interest carries its own consequences and perils. But most importantly, when you become involved in it, you miss the main point of psychological and spiritual endeavor, which is the search for the truth which is substantially more expansive than these material and quasi-spiritual concerns.

Finally...

7. Everything around us -- the earth, the sun, space, Nature, people and objects -- are based on the structure of our consciousness, which includes the consciousness of the Creator. When we discover what the spirit and consciousness is, we can manage our state of being, we can build the world and control every creative action and manifest results.

But this is what we doing already! Furthermore, does the earth, the sun etc. really exist around us? Are they not more truly in us (from the point of view of individual psychology)? Or from a deeper truth are these manifestations and us not really the same thing, i.e. consciousness? Does consciousness have a structure? How can the All truly have a structure? If it did wouldn't the world be rational and reasonable and make sense? Rather than be uncertain, irrational, arbitrary and random? Do we really want to control (what? We are all consciousness!) and manifest results when we are already doing precisely that, without being aware of how and what and why and when we are manifesting anything? In any case what do we mean by results -- this world, the truth, is a manifestation of all possible worlds at all times waiting for us to witness and become one with it.

BLOG entry #131

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. ‘Studies in Consciousness: The Truth Is A Manifestation of All Possible Worlds at All Times’ was first published in 2011.