A Spiritual Short-Cut to Emotional Tranquility, Less Stress and More Happiness

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Please note: the following post contains a spiritual practice that you should only attempt if you are relatively stable emotionally, self-aware and not under psychiatric care.

Also, remember to join us for tonight's Spiritual Life 1: Foundations teleseminar / webinar at: http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=21310599

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As you already know, we'll be examining the meaning of that nebulous phrase, "spiritual life", in my upcoming teleseminar series on the subject.  Whatever it means to you personally, though, there's little doubt you're interested improving your emotional life and increasing your subjective feeling of well-being.  

And that's a key point because it shows us that whatever spiritual life may mean to each of us, one common denominator is that it is somehow intimately related to our emotional being and, through that, to our very core as human beings.  

So what can you do TODAY to calm your mind, settle your emotions, shed your stress and remain increasingly tranquil no matter what's going on around you?  Well, there is one simple practice you could adopt that will do all this for you.  In its best articulated form, it's a Tibetan Buddhist practice, although elements of the ancient Christian mystical tradition and later Taoism both have equivalents.  Please note that you don't have to be a Buddhist to practice this - the results speak for themselves.

The Practice

Choose a day to start your practice.  It should be an ordinary weekday with nothing too unusual happening.  Here's what you'll do:

1. When you wake up, sit up for a few minutes in a meditative posture and focus on your breathing to calm your mind.
   
   
2. Once your mind is as calm as it will get, say to yourself, "Everything I encounter today is simply a projection of my mind.  Pleasant or unpleasant, everything I experience is no more real or substantial than a dream.  If someone acts in a way that is hurtful to me, I can simply remember this is just a projection of my mind so that a negative emotional reaction on my part would make no sense.  If something wonderful happens, I can simply remember that pleasant and unpleasant occurrences are always alternating, so there's no point in getting too excited."
   
   
3. As you take your shower, just say to yourself, "Here I am, washing this dream body with this dream soap."  And when you're getting your breakfast, realize you're pouring dream coffee into a dream mug.
   
   
4. As you go through your day, remind yourself continually that what you experience is a product of your mind.  And remind yourself that the more positive your emotional state now, and the more positively you can affect the state of other people, the more you are planting the seeds of positive experiences for yourself in the future.
   
   

This Spiritual Practice Has Several Advantages...

1. It reminds us that nothing we see or experience in our world exists in the same way that our senses suggest to us.  For example, all "material reality" is largely empty space and fields of energy.  There is no solid "matter" at all.  As Einstein once said, "Reality is an illusion... albeit a very convincing one."
   
   
2. It quickly severs the link between what happens to us and our habitual emotional responses, thus building our inner freedom.
   
   
3. It allows us to maintain a much calmer emotional life while at the same time building positive emotional content throughout the day.
    
   
4. In other words, events will no longer control how we feel.
   
   
5. We naturally find ourselves in the "place of the observer" - one of the principal goals of meditation and of deep prayer.
   
   
6. We find ourselves happier, with less stress and a lot more joy, all for very little effort.

Is there a catch?  Just one: this is a discipline and a practice - it doesn't work unless you do it.  One hint for you before you start - take it easy and begin with few expectations.  It's pretty common near the beginning to feel a sense of "Wow! This is SO cool!!" and then, a day or two later, to feel, "Damn, this is harder than I thought!"  

No worries, though.  That's all totally natural.  Just give it a try and feel free to share what you discover by commenting on this post or dropping us a line.  Enjoy!!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger :-)

Hard to Believe These Dinosaurs Still Exist...

Gobsmacked!

A few months back, my daughter mentioned to me that one of her friends would never even entertain the possibility that God or anything "spiritual" might be real because "it's not scientific".  

"What?" I replied, taken aback.  "Sounds like her mind is stuck in the '70s... and she wasn't born until the '90s!  You should tell her that her 'science' is a bit out of date."  

Truly, I'm always a little stunned when I run into someone who believes atheism is scientific.  Of course, I'm just as gobsmacked when an otherwise intelligent person informs me - as one did recently - that he considers alternative medicine to be nonsense and "witchcraft" and that he is happy to follow the advice of his allopathic MD exclusively.  "Well, that's your funeral," I thought.   


All these encounters remind me a little of my dear old dad who - and no, this is one hundred percent true - could never keep straight the difference between yoga and yogurt!!  To be fair, though, dad grew up in a much different time and was always open-minded enough to admit defeat if you could present him with irrefutable evidence.  After all, he was a lawyer!  


So what do you say to someone who's essentially stuck in the mechanistic worldview of the Newtonian Physics and can't break out of that paradigm?  What do you say when they accuse you of being unscientific, gullible, "new age" or plain stupid?

Here are some simple suggestions for you.  Just remember, what resonates with each person is unique, so be prepared to adjust your words accordingly ;-)

Helping to Open Their Minds

First, know why you want to engage them in conversation at all.  For me, it stems from the fact that the study of human resilience, which is the study of maximizing human potential, demands an absolutely unbiased, evidence-based and therefore scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality itself.  It's quite clear that if we allow ourselves to be slaves to preconceived notions and comfortable ideologies, we are not doing that.  


Second, remember there are four stages to any scientific discovery - 1. It's dismissed as rubbish, 2. It's persecuted as heresy, 3. "There may be something to this" and 4. "It's absolutely true and we thought of it first".


Knowing that's the case, consider the following short video, where Dr. William Tiller, professor emeritus of Stanford University, explains why some people, including scientists, just can't handle new information that challenges their assumptions:














Third, if they're talking about anything spiritual, you can inform them that the original versions of most of the great spiritual traditions espoused a scientific method based on using the human mind-body organism as the instrument of observation.  So, if they're really as scientific as they claim, they should logically be prepared to do one of two things: a) engage in the spiritual experiments these traditions have outlined in order to prove or disprove their claims, or b) admit their ignorance on the subject.  

To help you with this, you should read the short article on "True Skepticism" on Dr. Gary Schwartz' website here.  


(Also, feel free to share your copy of my book, The 5 Pillars of Life, with them should they want a more detailed explanation, or send them to the Global Resilience Solutions website to get their own). 



Fourth, be prepared to share with them some of the latest scientific evidence on human potential, including experiments in such things as distance healing, research into the human energy system, scientific validation for methods used in energy psychology, such as EFT, and more.


To get started, you can have a look at the works of:

• Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (UK biologist who has pioneered the theory of morphic / morphogenetic fields)
• Dr. William Tiller (Renowned US physicist studying subtle energy fields)
• Cyndi Dale (US author who has done extensive research into energy medicine across cultures)
• Dr. Gary Schwartz (Doctor of psychology, medicine and surgery at the University of Arizona and a researcher into the spiritual side of psychology)

There are lots of others, of course, so I'm not pretending that's a complete list by any means.  Hopefully, though, all this will help you more than hold your own the next time your run into someone who "didn't get the memo"! 

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

Identifying "Spiritual Life Gone Wrong"

Today we begin a two-part series on something at the very heart of the issues of our time all over the world: what happens when religion goes wrong...


In its most extreme forms, we see the results worldwide every day - radical evangelicals preaching violence against gays, a papacy in deep denial over the scale of sexual abuse in its midst, mass rioting and random killings throughout the Muslim world at the mere rumor of an anti-Islamic publication in the West, and the list goes on and on.

Those extreme forms are just symptoms, though.  They're symptoms whose causes remain largely hidden from us as a civilization because we no longer understand a fundamental truth - not everything that passes itself off as "spiritual" is good, healthy and beneficial.  Far from it...

In fact, as a civilization we've become so divorced from real spiritual life that our ability to sort out false spiritual paths from healthy ones is marginal at best.  We no longer know the distinguishing criteria of each, the questions to ask or the tell-tale signs of each.  


In reality, asking most people today to distinguish real spiritual paths from false ones is about as useful as asking a Kalahari bushman for advice on your next family car.  

The Vital Importance of Spiritual Resilience

To get anywhere close to figuring out what spiritual resilience means, we first have to define the word "spiritual", which is no simple task.  


So let's put it this way: just as resilience itself is a path toward maximizing your potential on all levels (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual), spiritual resilience is the act of opening yourself to the deepest truths of your existence in this universe so that you can become everything you're meant to be. 

Not surprisingly, you can never become truly resilient and fulfilled as a human person if you ignore your own spiritual dimension, since that is, in reality, the deepest layer of your own being.


What I've called "authentic ancient traditions" in my bestseller, The 5 Pillars of Life*, are ancient, tried and proven approaches for doing exactly this.  And, contrary to what we assume, they have a boatload of evidence to back up the authenticity of their discoveries.  

Religion vs. Authentic Ancient Traditions

Here's a short excerpt from The 5 Pillars of Life* to help you wrap your head around the differences between what we usually call "religions" and something much deeper:


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All fantasies, especially that of religion, are caused by a short-circuit at the centre of the human personality.  This short-circuit, which exists between the heart which pumps blood (the circulatory system) and the spinal cord which circulates spinal fluid (the nervous system) is only repaired by ceaseless prayer in the heart.  It is only when the short-circuit is repaired that you begin to be liberated from the realm of fantasy.

- Rev. Dr. John Romanides in “Religion as a Neurobiological Illness”[i]

Startling, isn’t it?  - A world-renowned Orthodox priest and theologian calling religion a “neurobiological illness”!  But he’s right - Orthodox Christianity is not a religion in the conventional Western sense of that word.  And for that matter, neither are other authentic ancient traditions.  What Westerners conventionally call "religion" is a term that applies almost exclusively to their own approach to life as it has developed historically over the last thousand years or so.

"Religion" in the Western sense the word has a number of particular traits.  And generally speaking these traits apply to the vast majority of Western people who "practice their religion":

1. Religious teachings are ideological statements divorced from real life and which people subscribe to based on emotional considerations.  Teachings of authentic traditions are based on an experience of true life, and practitioners adhere to them based on observable verification.  

2. Religion provides psychological comfort and self justification in the face of its failure to cure psycho-spiritual (noetic) illness.  Authentic traditions take you from sickness to health; religions tell you your sickness is health.

3. Religion shifts the blame for good and evil, and for the final outcome of life, onto a deity or process (saying, for example, that illness is a punishment from God or that God decides whether to forgive you and send you to heaven or to damn you to hell).  Authentic traditions know that the Absolute Reality never does harm and that the only real danger to us in this world or hereafter comes from ourselves.

4. Religions and authentic traditions both have a ceremonial aspect or some collective manifestation, but the religious version exists to provide psychological comfort or aesthetic pleasure, whereas the authentic version is there to lead you to self-transformation.

5. Religion is always reduced to a compartment of life, whereas training in any authentic tradition involves every moment of life.

6. Religion's "transformation" of human life is limited to the superficial aspects of the personality, is often based on a tedious list of prohibitions and is geared toward social acceptability.  Religion produces nice people; authentic traditions produce extraordinary ones.

7. Real self-transformation is not a goal of religion; the knowledge and methods required for self-transformation are absent and there is no access to a lineage of transformed people.  Life degenerates into “salvation by association” (I’m saved because I’m part of the group) and “salvation by conviction” (I’m saved because I hold a particular opinion).

   

8. Religion is ignorant of the technical terminology of self-transformation and interprets it in a general and nebulous way.  The religious version of a tradition will seldom have any real idea what the authentic version is talking about, even if they use the same language.   

 

9. Religion is comfort-loving and presents no real challenge to its adherents, whereas authentic traditions take you beyond your comfort zone and into realms that religion knows nothing of. 

10.  Religion abhors mystery and tries to explain everything with concepts.  These concepts can be controlled and manipulated by a cadre of “experts” for the good of the institution, whereas transformed people – saints, immortals or bodhisattvas - are notoriously hard to control.

Given these traits of religion, it is not too surprising that Father Romanides classifies religion as a "neurobiological illness".  What this means is that religion has its origin in the fallen state – where the neurobiological malfunction characteristic of life in the fallen world has not been healed – and that it perpetuates this unhealed state as if it were normal.  So it is not surprising that religion prevents countless millions of people from finding true fulfillment and happiness.  And like all illness, it leads to untold suffering and misery.

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[i] Pages 1-3.  The order of the elements in this quotation has been slightly rearranged for the sake of clarity.  Several Orthodox writers of the twentieth century noted that the word “religion” as commonly used among peoples of  European ethnic origin does not correspond to Orthodox Christianity. 

*The 5 Pillars of Life is available on the Amazon.ca website or through http://www.the5pillarsoflife.com. 

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Next time, we'll talk about some of the real "dark side" of the religion and spirituality that's out there now - how to identify it and avoid it.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

 

Prayer - a Vital Resilience Practice

The requests keep coming in... they never stop.  "Talk more about prayer, meditation and spiritual life." "Will prayer help my health?"  "How does prayer fit into resilience and how is it different from meditation?"  And the list goes on...

So this week I'll do my best to answer and to help you make sense out of all this by talking about prayer.  We're going to do this in three parts.  First we'll talk about some of the basics.  Then, in mid-week, we'll talk about prayer in the sense most people are familiar with, as a request for a specific outcome.  And finally, on Friday, we'll get to the "real chocolate" of spiritual life - prayer as a continuous spiritual communion with the Absolute reality.  

"I Know Lots of People Who Pray... and Most of Them Are Wackos!"

If that statement describes the way you feel, believe me, you're not alone.  I'm a priest of the Orthodox Church and I feel the same way! 

So yes, you'll find lots of deluded people who "pray" frequently.  The Taliban folks pray.  Your Aunt Mildred who keeps beating you over the head with the Bible prays.  The TV evangelist who tells you God wants you to send him your money prays too.  Of course, all these people are praying more to their own delusions than anything else.  Prayer can transform you life into paradise on earth, but... if you stubbornly persist in delusion, it can destroy you.

Back in late 19th century Russia, someone asked a holy man named Theophan the Recluse why so many "religious" people were plain nuts.  The old man, who was a great teacher of prayer, replied that when you put yourself in contact with the Uncreated Being, you either accept that power into your life or you resist and distort it.  If you accept it, you become more like the divine - more loving, more peaceful, more integrated and more whole on every level.  If, however, you resist, you become the opposite of all that.  In short, if you're trying to use prayer to build up your ego instead of get past it, you're on the path to self-destruction. 
 

We, however, are presumably interested in prayer for the right reasons - to feel spiritually connected to the source of life, to fill our hearts with love, gratitude and joy, and to radiate compassion to those around us.  As long as this is our aim, and as long as we're genuinely trying to distinguish truth from falsehood, we're not in any danger of joining the wackos mentioned above.  

Do I Need Prayer to Become Resilient?

Looked at scientifically - and all authentic ancient mystical traditions were rigorously scientific - if the Absolute Reality exists (and they verified this), and if you are therefore in the image of or contain the nature and potentiality of the Absolute within you (also verified), and if the purpose of life is union with / transformation by this Absolute (another verified discovery), then it follows that if you are not consciously in communion with this Absolute, you are falling below you potential, weakening yourself and losing resilience.  Pretty simple, isn't it? 

You'll find a much more detailed discussion of all that in The 5 Pillars of Life, of course, but I can tell you now that in the eyes of any Authentic Ancient Tradition worldwide, if you don't pray, you're like someone who's never experienced real life at all.    

What If I'm Not Sure About God?

That's okay.  If you grew up in a "religious" milieu, you may still be struggling deep down with the idea that God is a cosmic despot with a significant anger-management problem, that He demands blind conformity to what some institution has told you and that if you don't believe in Him 100%, He's already really ticked off with you. 


Nonsense!  Without getting into the particulars, the whole idea of the angry God is a false teaching, according to the original Christian tradition.  There's some more information on this in The 5 Pillars of Life, as well.  Here's an example of what the early Christian tradition really learned about the divine being.  I suggest you read the following very carefully...


"God is good.  He only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same.  We men, on the other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him.  But if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him.  By living in holiness, we cleave to God; but by becoming wicked, we make Him our enemy.  It is not that He grows angry with us in some arbitrary way, but it is our own sins that prevent God from shining within us and expose us to the demons who torture us.  And if through prayer and acts of compassion we gain release from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him change, but that through our actions and our turning to God we have cured our wickedness and so once more have enjoyment of God's goodness.  Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind."(1)


St. Silouan of Athos, a great Orthodox Christian spiritual teacher of the 20th century, once said there are only two kinds of spiritual people - those who believe in God and those who know God.  The latter are those who have had a direct, overwhelming encounter with the Uncreated.  

So if you're not too sure if God exists or what God / the Absolute reality is like, that's okay.  You need to be honest with yourself.  There is very little difference between you and the person who, to use Silouan's words, just "believes" but doesn't yet "know".  That person has simply taken a different ideological stand than you have.  However, he or she is still in the dark, in a manner of speaking.  


And yes, there are lots of Christians who'll be happy to tell you they "know" God, but their "knowledge" of God unfortunately has nothing to do with "knowing God" as the ancient mystical tradition taught and still teaches.  And Silouan was a typical example of that tradition. 

Finally, you may also be struggling, even unconsciously, with the whole idea of God as "father" or parental figure.  This can be especially troubling for people who have grown up in dysfunctional family environments where the parental role models were incompetent, if not overtly toxic.  It's no secret that how you related to your parents can have a huge effect on how you conceive of God.  Fortunately, there's an antidote.. a very old antidote that works wonders...

You see, unlike the Christianity of the West over the last millennium, the ancient tradition explicitly taught that you should not take verbal descriptions of God too literally.  Using what we now call "apophatic" theology or "theology by negation", the ancient tradition says that if we say, for example, that God is "good", then we also have to say that God is not "good" as we imagine that word, but good in a way that goes beyond our usual concepts.  And likewise, is we refer to God as "He", using the masculine pronoun (a huge stumbling block for many, given the historical shortcomings of most cultures), then we must also add that we do NOT mean "male as opposed to female" in the sense of human gender.  


So if you find yourself hung up on some of the traditional language about God, know that it was never intended to be taken in the simplistic way you were probably taught, and you can cheerfully dissociate your mental image of God from your parents.  


As Silouan said, after a particularly intense encounter with the Absolute Reality, "God is love insatiable."  When one of Silouan's contemporaries was asked by a younger person why he was always weeping, he answered, "My child, when God appears to you, all you can do is weep for joy!"




What's Coming Up Next:


Next time, we'll talk about putting your requests out there in prayer and how to do it so you get results.  In ancient times, prayer was referred to as "the art of arts and the science of sciences" and there's more to it than you ever imagined...


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger :-)

Spiritual Life: Reality or Delusion? (Part 1)

"All fantasies, especially that of religion, are caused by a short-circuit at the centre of the human personality.  This short-circuit, which exists between the heart which pumps blood (the circulatory system) and the spinal cord which circulates spinal fluid (the nervous system) is only repaired by ceaseless prayer in the heart.  It is only when the short-circuit is repaired that you begin to be liberated from the realm of fantasy."

- Rev. Dr. John Romanides in “Religion as a Neurobiological Illness”

Startling, isn’t it?  - A world-renowned Orthodox Christian priest and theologian calling religion a “neurobiological illness” and a "fantasy"!    You may remember that quotation from chapter one of The 5 Pillars of Life.  I'm bringing it up here because one question I get asked frequently is:

"How do you tell which spiritual paths will transform you life and which ones will wreck your life?" 

A month from now I'll have a whole new class of university students to explore that question with, as we take a really hard, analytical look at not only the world's major "religions", but contemporary spiritual trends as well.




So why is spirituality important at all?  Who needs it?  Simple... if you want to become a truly resilient human being, you cannot do so without a spiritual life because spiritual life, if it's real, is the only way to actualize the full potential of your being.  On the most obvious level, committing yourself to high values and principles will take you beyond the narrow confines of your ego and even beyond the constraints of this short life.  On a deeper level, there is no other way to open the depths of your being to a direct experience of the Absolute Reality. 




Of course, a quick look at the news is all you need to convince you that what we conventionally call "religion" can be a pretty scary thing - right wing fundamentalists condemning minority groups or telling their people how "God wants them to vote", Muslim demonstrators carrying placards saying, "Behead those who insult Islam!" are just the tip of the iceberg.  

You may remember that in The 5 Pillars of Life I make a clear distinction between "religions" and "Authentic Ancient Traditions" and outline the differences.  People in our culture these days tend to think religion - the institutional version - is bad, whereas "spirituality" - the individual version - is good.  Reality is not quite so simple.  So how do you tell the kind of spiritual approach that will transform you into a saint / Bodhisattva / immortal from the kind that will transform you into a neurotic, a terrorist or a self-righteous jerk?

Powerful Questions to Ask About ANY Spiritual Path:

1.  Does it insist that the only way to be saved or avoid eternal torture is to become a member and / or believe in its creed?

2. Does it tell you that God is angry, judgmental and is basically just waiting for you to slip up so He can punish you?

3. Does it give rise to a culture of guilt and shame?

4. Does it teach you that God hates "unbelievers" or that you need to convert them by force or otherwise oppress them?

5. If you try to leave this spiritual path, will your life be in danger?

6. Do its teachings give rise to large scale emotional dysfunction? 

If you're involved in or thinking of becoming involved in any spiritual path where the answer to any of these questions would be "yes", then I'd suggest you run screaming in the other direction... fast.  

In general, any "spiritual" path advocating violence is simply a fascist religious ideology masquerading as the will of God.  Those that have moral teachings that produce emotional dysfunction are usually distorted versions (religions) of earlier Authentic Ancient Traditions.  

Unless a tradition meets the following criteria, it's highly likely to be either a dumbed down version of an authentic tradition (i.e., a religion) or simply a fake from day one.  Here's what every legitimate spiritual path must have or do:


1. It must teach that a total mind-body transformation of the human being is possible, that it can begin in this life and that every human being, here and now, can come to a direct experience of the Absolute Reality (God or whatever the name might be).


2. It must possess a deep spiritual teaching that includes meditation and / or unceasing noetic prayer.


3. It must be able to prove that there is an unbroken lineage of transformed people who have put this teaching into practice, been transformed by it, and can pass it on.


4. It must be able to prove that it gets the results it claims, preferably by demonstrating this across multiple cultures for several centuries.


5. It must value love, compassion and humility above all else and teach forgiveness.  


These simple criteria will enable anyone to get to the truth about any tradition in short order.  


If you're a Christian or if you know the New Testament well, you may remember a section from the book of Acts (5:34-40) where a Pharisee named Gamaliel says that any spiritual movement that comes from God will survive and thrive, whereas any movement not from God will just fade away.  Since many Christians are used to the idea the Bible contains no errors, they may not have noticed that there's only one problem with Gamaliel's theory...

...It's plain wrong.  Total crap, actually.  History proves that many religious movements have existed for over a millennium, with hundreds of millions of followers, and that these same movements have given rise to near constant strife, killing, emotional dysfunction / neurosis and endless misery.  

So be really careful before you commit your spiritual future to anything.  If you apply the simple criteria above, though, you'll be just fine.

Next time, we'll talk about how to build a firm foundation for your spiritual life.


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger