Personal
development
and spirituality
Personal development programs aim to enhance our lives as people.
Spirituality might be defined as the awareness that we are not just a little person, with his/her expectations and illusions, and so can no longer be blinded by the dead end which consists in running after such illusions. The human scope is much vaster.
In the spiritual approach, the need to improve things or the certainty of achieving happiness through personal satisfaction must, to a great extent, give way.
Why? The personal structure always runs up against a limit because it is itself a limit. It runs up against its own limit. There is no true expansion at a personal level.
The true expansion we sense and to which we aspire in all our approaches and efforts is beyond the personal and the relational, even if both may incidentally benefit from them.
It is no longer a question of enhancing relations or heightening the comfort of personal existence. The history of humanity shows that we cannot manage to do this. What we have to do is to realize our genuine nature, free from attachments. Only when we are aware of this does the passageway open up towards the spiritual work. Such awareness does not, however, deny psychological analysis but encompasses it in a wider vision of human destiny.
The couple, on which many of
us focus their attention and hopes, is not an end in itself. It
is not the goal at the end of the road.
The couple can continue or dissolve. From this viewpoint, there is no difference. Sometimes, a revitalizing break-up is better than trying to repair models that are profoundly rooted in frustration and ingrown habit. Making a relationship last is the same as changing it constantly, if the bases remain the same. When I say this, I’m not denying the games and joys within the relationship but replacing them against the backdrop of the end of the race.
However things may be, if the relationship can be a place conducive to opening up the heart, it is not in itself the cause of such opening-up. Polarizing the attention on an instrument of the personal quest in order to attain spiritual awakening would be a little off center stage.
In a book which was sent me to present work which had been carried out on the couple, I came across a phrase in the authors’ conclusion: "(...) make the feeling of love last in all its intensity and permanently so". I find this quest implicit in the approach set out in the text, even if the evocation of the spiritual is present everywhere.
If you have read between the lines of what I’ve been saying, you will have understood that this is one of the hubs of the illusion. The benchmark of the spiritual being is no longer either intensity or duration, which are only fantasies. And although I may know the exercises which aim to restore happiness within the couple and their occasional value, the intention at the root of this hope is distorted. It is impossible to experience things at a personal level in any "permanent" way.
The only permanence we may experience is the permanence of welcoming what is.
When our vision achieves a certain maturity, it grows towards accepting what is, towards welcoming the various forms of the intelligence of Life, which do not often respect our principles, certainties and plans. Our vision is then extended to a wider field, in which we jettison our prefabricated objectives, our atavistic expectations and our career paths. All that remains is a soul offered up to a wider Path (in the sense that it is "not restricted to personal history") which the mind cannot grasp. This is the experience of Surrender.
In conclusion: personal history, the couple, jobs – all these can be places for expressing the joy of being alive but they are not the causes of such joy. Any confusion over this point may lead to frustration and to the feeling of going round in circles, feelings that I find so widespread in groups which aim at "working on the self".
To be continued...
Thierry