I have just had someone stay with me for a week in Majorca for a Psychospiritual’ Intensive’ where the entire time is devoted to psychological and spiritual exploration, and I am yet again reminded what a powerful process this is, if, that is, the client is familiar with inner work and truly has a commitment to their process and seeks to be the best they can be. Continue reading
The second week of September was some crazy London week for me, as I went to two launches for my book, Awakening the Universal Heart, one on the 10th of September and the other the next day.
On the 10th of September I invited only my oldest friends – those I’ve known since we were kids – and it was fitting that it took place at the wonderfully eccentric flat of Peter Adler, dripping with tribal art and exotic ethnic jewellery and artefacts. About sixty people came. It is special when you have your oldest friends around you – and we’re all getting pretty ancient now – as you can let your hair down. Nothing to prove. They know all your many idiosyncrasies.
One of the things we need to remember is that we all have multiple intelligences and that different aspects of ourselves exist at different levels. Thus, we may be pretty evolved in one or two areas, whereas in other arenas of our lives, we may be less adept and in some areas pretty hopeless.
Let us look, for example, at six aspects of life: our cognitive (intellectual) skills, our interpersonal skills (how adept we are at relating with others), our ‘street cred’ (how practical we are at handling the everyday nitty gritty challenges in life), our emotional, moral and spiritual intelligence. Some of us may be highly skilled at a cognitive level (two Ph.D’s in astrophysics) but have absolutely no interpersonal or emotional skills. Someone might be very emotionally and cognitively skilled but have absolutely no moral sense, i.e., we are a total shit, and we use our intelligence primarily to dupe and manipulate others. (I can think of a couple of CEOs of large companies who fit into this category.)
Question.
Serge, you have just written a book on Spiritual Activism and the emergence of the Global Heart. Let me start by asking you a few questions. First, what do you mean by the global heart and why is it ‘awakening’ today, and how does it relate to spiritual activism? And secondly, how does spiritual activism differ from other forms of activism?
Serge. Good questions. I’ll try to answer them in order. When I talk about the global or the universal heart, I am referring to the heart of humanity as a whole or the collective human heart which, if our own ‘personal’ hearts are sufficiently open, we can potentially link into or connect with.
We will know when we are connected or when the universal heart has stared awakening inside us, when we start feeling furious about the many huge injustices in the world or when we find ourselves minding what happens to people who live right at the other end of the world from us, or when we suddenly experience a mysterious love for our fellow human beings whom we’ve never met, or feel moved to commit to championing some cause where there is no direct, personal gain to ourselves.
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Question: ‘Serge, do you believe in the reality of evil? Do you think it exists? if so, what should we do about it?
Serge: I do believe in evil, yes, and certainly feel that if we are to have a better world that we should understand it and, if we feel strong enough, confront it and not bury our heads, ostrich-like, and pretend it is not there. You know that old saying about evil being allowed when good people do nothing. Well, it’s true! However, if we are to ‘do anything’ about evil, we need to recognise its many different faces. The way I see it is that there are two kinds of evil: obvious evil and non-obvious evil. Obvious evil is, well, obvious. It is about Hitler, Robert Mugabe, Darfur, Stalin, Genocide, Auschwitz, murder, torture, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Etc. Continue reading |
‘We seem to be seeing a strong impulse for freedom springing up in the world today – especially in the Middle East, with all the manifestations of ‘people power’ that we have been witnessing, especially with what has just been going on in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain and now Libya . Do you have hope that a better world is in the offing? If so, what do you think of those prophecies that foretell the end of the world in 2012? Doesn’t that sound rather scary?’ Continue reading
Question: I have often heard Spiritual gurus say that we should not get attached to the drama of world politics, that we should individually aim for evolutionary change but that politics can draw us into unhelpful dramas. Could you advise on whether you agree with this stance, especially with reference to the sweeping evolutionary changes in the Middle East at this time?Serge: This used to be typical ‘guru advice’ half a century ago, i.e., focus on your own development and let the world ‘out there’ look after itself. Change yourself and the world will change. Spirituality and politics shouldn’t mix. Well, times today have changed. With most of us, I don’t believe we can be effectively ‘spiritual’ without also involving ourselves in some way with the betterment of our society, and what this means is that a lot of the time we can’t avoid being political, which I define very broadly as being willing to live as our stance for the kind of world we want to see emerge.
