JOYFUL PIECE #86

Growing our souls

Image by RPBG, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons [Note 1]

Coping with deplorable news, I ran into Maurice Nicoll’s analysis in Note 2. These are my reflections— I am not a mental health professional nor a spiritual director.

Nicoll notes that for good mental and spiritual health there is a need for the individual to develop an inner psychology [Note 3]. It allows understanding of the outer world and the outer psychology that we have acquired, externally, through others. That external psychology, it appears, can take over and influence how we feel about personal and life events. Note 2 suggests to me that we must develop the skills to self-observe and notes that what we take to be real might be a construct made of pictures, roles, and attitudes:

-Pictures of ourselves that do not account for our imperfections and failings in life and lead to lying and oppression of others in the pursuit of a false reality. We are what we call others. “Everything false arouses its opposite.” [Note 2].

-Roles that we play falsely believing that we enact the roles. Those roles control us. The inherently false roles compel us to act in continually destructive ways. We get lost in a stage of our own making.

-Attitudes about life and people developed through blind acceptance of false tenets, self-imposed or influenced during early (and late) formative years. These attitudes are intimately linked to the aforementioned pictures and roles providing a distorted picture of reality. It appears that attitudes, if we are honest, are generally negative and used to judge people, conditions, and situations.

Are the actions of the POTUS regime a failure by that administration, at the individual and collective level, to develop a healthy inner psychology? Are they prisoners of their self-imposed or formational imposed pictures, roles, and attitudes? Their focus on the outcomes of their initiatives causes much suffering when they impose their constructs on others. Should they shed their constructs until they confront their motivations? They seem to always wallow in negativity and to blame others for their dislikes. I observe the regime in action and feel its hateful speech, self-centeredness, and lack of compassion for humanity.

To be truly free, we should shed the pictures, roles, and attitudes that cloud our judgment. We must be unafraid in facing reality as it is. We must be mindful of what we are feeling and why we are feeling it. We must develop our inner psychology.

A focus on process reached through diversity, equity and inclusion, will build a compassionate world for all. The outcome is always uncertain, but we have the power to control the process that is used, and that is success itself.

We have the power to develop a healthy inner psychology and be joyful regardless of outside personal and/or societal circumstances.

Be joyful! It feels a heck of lot better than sadness and builds up our capacity to confront the current regime positively.

Smile and carry on in opposing tyranny.

20250216

[Note 1] This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

[Note 2] Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, Volume 3, page 927ff.

[Note 3]. My understanding is that inner psychology appears to be akin to soul, second body, kedjan body, real self. It seems that it is not acquired but must be developed by the individual.