CREATIVE PRAYER
SCHOLARLY ARTICLES BY PETER FRITZ WALTER THE LAW OF EVIDENCE THE RESTRICTION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE AND WELLNESS TECHNIQUES CONSCIOUSNESS AND SHAMANISM CREATIVE PRAYER
CREATIVE PRAYER THE MIRACLE ROAD by Peter Fritz Walter
Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC 113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA ©2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for derivative works, also for commercial purposes, as long as the rights of the author are attributed. The attribution must be given to the best of the user’s ability with the information available. Third party licenses or copyright of quoted resources are untouched by this license and remain under their own license. The moral right of the author has been asserted Set in Avenir Light and Trajan Pro Designed by Peter Fritz Walter ISBN 978-1-516836-80-2 Publishing Categories Self-Help / Motivational & Inspirational Publisher Contact Information
[email protected] http://sirius-c-publishing.com Author Contact Information
[email protected] About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter http://peterfritzwalter.com Pierre’s Blog https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/
About the Author Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciences and humanities. He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a high school award for creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine. After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in European Integration at Saarland University, Germany, and with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1987. He then took courses in psychology at the University of Geneva and interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist in Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his inner child. After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher, and photographer. Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese. All of Pierre’s books are hand-crafted and self-published, designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).
IN MEMORY OF THE LATE DR. JOSEPH MURPHY (1898-1981)
The author’s profits from this book are being donated to charity.
Contents ❊
Introduction
11
WHAT IS PRAYER?
21
No Belief, But Faith
21
Not Linear, but Cyclic Thinking
23
No God Concept
28
No Suggestion. No Hypnosis.
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LEARN THE TECHNIQUE
31
Relax and Affirm
31
Build a Positive Attitude
33
Forgive and Choose
35
Keep It Short
38
Create Your Own Reality
40
Change Your Inner Program
43
Be More Creative
45
Relax Properly
47
Become Spontaneous
50
PRACTICE CREATIVE PRAYER
53
Learning Motivation
56
Teaching Motivation
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CREATIVE PRAYER
Learning and Techniques
57
Self-Healing
58
Self-Acceptance
59
The Principle of Inner and Outer Harmony 60
ACTIVATE SELF-HEALING
63
BUILD SELF-CONFIDENCE
67
CREATE INNER PEACE
81
POSTFACE
91
Glossary
103
Terms
103
Alpha, Alpha State Brain and Mind Research Cartesian Science and Worldview Consciousness Creative Visualization Direct Perception Emotional Intelligence I Ching Inner Selves Intuition Koan Life Authoring Quantum Physics Self Soul Power Synchronicity
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103 104 106 108 109 110 111 112 113 118 118 119 120 126 127 128
CONTENTS
Taoism, Tao Tarot Yin-Yang Zen
129 130 131 133
Personalities
135
Berne, Eric Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Confucius Descartes, René Einstein, Albert Freud, Sigmund Heraclitus Jesus of Nazareth Jung, Carl Gustav Krishnamurti, J. (K) Lao-tzu Murphy, Joseph Picasso, Pablo
135 136 137 138 139 139 141 141 142 142 145 147 148
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Personal Notes
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9
Introduction ❊
The prayer method that I am going to present here was first outlined in basically two essays by the spiritualist James Allen and, Abel L. Allen. James Allen published As a Man Thinketh in 1902, and Abel Allen wrote The Message of New Thought in 1914. Next in the development of the method comes Ernest Holmes, founder of the ‘Science of Mind’ and author of a book with the same title, which was published in 1922. The book is both a compendium of philosophical wisdom and a practical manual that teaches practitioners how to give treatments using the unique prayer technique.
CREATIVE PRAYER
Eventually, it was in the 1960s and 70s that the method really became popular through the books of Dr. Joseph Murphy and Catherine Ponder. Joseph Murphy called it scientific prayer. —See Peter Fritz Walter, Joseph Murphy and the Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Great Minds Series, Vol. 6), 2015.
Indeed, this kind of prayer is not founded upon belief, but upon knowledge; it is based upon insights in the functioning of the human unconscious as, perhaps first in history, Sigmund Freud described it. Well, I began reading Freud already upon entering law school, so I was well aware that the abuse and trauma I had suffered all through my childhood had become imprinted, in the form of thought patterns, on the memory surface of my subconscious mind.
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INTRODUCTION
I discovered the prayer technique during the time of my therapy and told my psychiatrist about it, to see with him if that work was compatible with the therapy. He replied that it was not only compatible, but something like an ideal add-on to it. With that reassurance, then, from the side of my psychiatrist, I was practicing affirmative prayer every day, consistently, over a period of six months. The results were more than convincing, they were actually quite miraculous. My constant anxiety and compulsive sweating gradually ceased, my feet were behaving in somewhat normal ways, instead of being frozen all day long, and most importantly, my thoughts were getting a note of self-affirmation that I had never known before. I was developing a new self-image. Observing my self-talk, I realized that before that time I constantly wiped myself out through disempowering self-talk. 13
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Eventually, I experienced moments of peace, harmony and bliss that were novelty for me. As a result, my creative expression exploded, and I could not stop the flow that was set in place. I began to write and created in virtually all literary genres, from essays to film scripts; in addition I created hundreds of spontaneous drawings, and many volumes of spontaneously composed music. Eventually I became also successful as a coach, and my corporate seminars were found to be creative, amusing and effective. It is for that reason that I was going to name this prayer technique Creative Prayer. And it was only then that I realized that for the first time in my life I began to manifest my soul reality, expressing in my creations not my ego, or conditioned self, but something from a beyond-realm that I can’t express in verbal
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INTRODUCTION
language. And at the same time I became acutely aware that such kind of spontaneous intelligent self-expression is what primes in life. In fact, emotionally intelligent children create exactly in the same way, at every moment when they play; they share their soul values through manifesting their soul power. Not long ago, science and religion were tightly separated, and some people even asserted that the two realms of human endeavor needed to be split apart. And yet, we know that in ancient civilizations science, philosophy and religion were one body of knowledge. To be true, the most ancient of religions were always both scientific and metaphysical because they knew that knowledge is limited; the myths and tales of old were expressing the unknown realms of existence, showing examples of how hidden connections can manifest once the circular movement of thought is dis15
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rupted by an unusual or sudden event. Taoism, the oldest known religion, from ancient China, was scientific in that it was based upon the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and the immutable cosmic laws that this wisdom book embodies and describes. So it is with Huna, the ancient science-religion of the Kahuna natives in Hawaii. Today, even popular science books mention the I Ching as a unique example for a supremely intelligent view of life that explains pattern, cosmic dependencies, and relationships between things, events and people, as well as the hidden connections we call synchronistic correlations, and that we express through binary-code mathematics. The other element, that might be called the deliberate uncertainty principle, in those traditional religions, is divination, which is a
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INTRODUCTION
form of exploration outside the realm of certainty, and that runs as it were on probability, extrapolating the present content of consciousness on a timeline into the future. Ancient religious traditions were more wistful than modern materialism in that they saw that there is no contradiction between the certainty of knowledge, and scientific exactitude, on one hand, and uncertainty as the tertium after thesis and antithesis, on the other; in fact, they wistfully understood that the relationship between both realms of human perception is one of complementarity. When you explore religion with a scientific mindset, you will find that much of what the hyper-rationalists held to be superstition and magic is actually a realm of knowledge that belongs to perennial science.
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I believe affirmative prayer is not only scientific, but that it is also a form of positive self-empowerment; even assuming you are empowered by a divine force or god, the empowerment comes from yourself, in the sense of coming from your higher self; after all, you are sitting down for it. In giving that effort, while it’s kind of effortless to do this, you are participating in the divine plan. Thus it can be said that we are engaging in a form of participatory consciousness when we pray. It doesn’t matter if you believe in a divine superpower or in your higher self, your guardian angel, your heavenly parents, your ancestor spirits, or whatever you call that creator force; fact is that you, by an act of will, sit down to pray. By doing this, you create the thought forms that are going to trigger a positive and creative response from the universe provided that what you wish to happen for 18
INTRODUCTION
yourself or others is non-harmful, constructive, and ultimately in alignment with cosmic purpose.
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WHAT IS PRAYER? ❊
No Belief, But Faith Let me first explain what I mean when I use the term prayer. What kind of prayer am I talking about, and why do I name it creative prayer? First, I am not talking about prayer as part of a religious ritual, the prayer people do in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues. Furthermore, the prayer I am talking about is not based upon belief. In creative prayer no belief is involved, but faith. Faith and belief are not the same. Belief is an intellectual concept while faith is a quality of the heart.
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Many of us believe that faith brings about prayer, but it is equally true that prayer enhances faith. People tend to argue that without faith prayer had no sense. When we eat we believe that what we eat will be good for our body; we also have faith that tomorrow we’re still alive; otherwise nobody would ever make plans. When we hurt our body we are confident that the power of healing in our organism will quickly repair the damage. Faith is something very basic, very natural, and something not reflected upon. People who say they have no faith are wrong. I ask them one question: —Do you make any plans? They of course affirm. And even if they didn’t make plans, they still do have faith in that tomorrow morning they are going to wake up to a new day and not just die the
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same night. Clearly, without this basic faith, humanity would never have achieved anything because people would just not have any regard into the future. To conclude, we cannot not have faith. It’s as simple as that.
Not Linear, but Cyclic Thinking Faith is not based upon linear thought but upon cyclic thinking, and more precisely, upon cyclic growth processes. Our culture has created the line as a symbol for evolution. However, the line is an artificial construct, inexistent in nature, a purely mental achievement. Evolution is cyclic. It allows the line only in combination with the circle, so as to say, resulting in the spiral. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines the spiral as relating to the ‘advancement to
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higher levels through a series of cyclical movements.’ The curving movement of the spiral is what it has in common with the circle; the increase or decrease in size of the spiral is a function of its moving upward or downward. The spiral is without a doubt the dominating form to be found in nature, and in all natural processes. It is a symbol for evolution in general. Life is coded in the spiraled double-helix of the DNA molecule. The spiral is the expression of the periodic, systemic and cyclic development that is in accordance with the laws of life. The progression of the spiral shows that it always carries its root, however transporting it through every cycle onto a higher level or dimension; whereas the line leaves its root forever.
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All towers of Babel are manifestations of the line: they are linear and are created by linear thought structures. True growth typically manifests through a cyclic and spiraled gestalt. Liberated from linear thought structures, man finds faith without effort. Or faith finds man. There is no better means than creative prayer for triggering this liberation from linear thought. Linear thought is purely causal and founded upon mutuality, whereas the law of love is neither causal nor based upon a condition. Neither is it teleological, but simply existing or existential. It is beyond causality and synchronistic. Truth is beyond causality and beyond time. Where all is synchronistic, time ends.
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The creation principle, being beyond time, beyond space, beyond causality, beyond ratio and beyond thought categories cannot be grasped mentally. However, we carry it with us in every single cell, in the tiniest entity of the hologram of life. All what we know of this beyond-thought is that we do not know about it. It therefore is the ideal soil for faith. That is why the one who knows much and not one who knows little has the greatest faith. Ignorance is no fertilizer for religion, despite the fact that the power mechanisms of certain religions have exploited human ignorance for their profit. When we pray creatively we hold the existence of all-that-is for more likely than its nonexistence, and thus we do not run around like a blind hen who finds a corn here and there.
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We then are ‘seeing with other eyes and hearing with other ears.’ Regarding this basic fact of our mental limitation towards the unknowable, we really can be like children and have the grace which is promised and which is based on something like ‘une heureuse insouciance.’ The Heraclitean ‘All Flows’ is perhaps the greatest expression of faith in history although it has to my knowledge never been considered as such. Prayer brings all our inner parts into a state of harmony, a balance of yin and yang. It creates a balance between rational mind and emotion, between knowledge and belief, between male-giving (yang) and femalereceiving (yin), between high and low, good and bad, positive and negative, white and black, going forward, standing still or going
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backward, and so forth. Prayer establishes complete mental, emotional and physical health and wellbeing.
No God Concept The next important point is that creative prayer is not based upon a god concept. It is based upon the existence of a universe that is the result of all-that-is, infinite wisdom, silence, love and energy—the creator principle, the word, the logos. What is beyond thought cannot be put in words; the non-manifest cannot be imagined as something manifest. Let us say, therefore, that creative prayer is based upon the existence of potentiality or universal creative potential. Prayer addresses the quantum field, the nonlinear continuum that is mostly, but not
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exclusively, located in the invisible realms of existence. Furthermore, creative prayer is not a wish or a demand, but an affirmation. We simply affirm a state of affairs we wish to realize and that is not yet manifest, and we affirm it as if it was already manifest and realized.
No Suggestion. No Hypnosis. Last not least, I would like to clarify why I consciously use the word prayer and not the term auto-suggestion. The question was once asked by my father who wondered why I talked at all about a prayer technique instead of using the term auto-suggestion. In Germany, there notably exists a technique called ‘Autosuggestion’ and people use that quite successfully for dealing with timidity or for fighting alcoholism or drug addiction. While indeed both techniques do the same, there is a difference. 29
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When I say ‘prayer,’ I mean that I address my words to a force that is beyond the mere rational mind, thought or the tangible, physical world. I namely implicitly recognize an invisible realm of existence, and a supreme energy that is the creator force. However, when I use the word ‘suggestion,’ I implicitly make a reference to modern reductionist science and psychology that affirm there is nothing beyond our five senses and that all the rest is fantasy, imagination, psychosis or charlatanism. Because I simply know that there is an allencompassing quantum field of which the physical world is only a tiny part, I will stick to the word prayer and call it creative prayer because it is a form of creative writing and gradually brings about a new reality through conscious and subconscious mind working together in sync. 30
LEARN THE TECHNIQUE ❊
Relax and Affirm How to work with the prayers? Best practice is to calmly recite them at least two times a day, in the morning after waking up, and in the evening before going to sleep, so as to profit from the natural relaxation that takes place in your mindbody during these special moments of the day. Creative prayer helps imprint your subconscious mind with positive images, images that heal and help you to be successful and happy in all areas of life. In order to access this part of your consciousness you must get into what is called a light trance.
CREATIVE PRAYER
Typically, this light trance is brought about when your brain is in the so-called alpha state. Before explaining you the details, let me shortly point out why we need relaxation at all. When we are relaxed, we more easily focus inside. We become still and listen to ourselves. When we feel connected to the source of peace in us, there is nothing that cannot be, and we will be radiant, joyful, powerful, wonderfully successful and blessed with all life can offer. In order to work on the fulfillment of our desires, we need to connect with the supreme power that we bear inside of us! When we relax and let go, we let life offer its gifts freely to us instead of chasing life for receiving those gifts. What creative prayer does in fact is to gradually change your mindset which is now perhaps a mindset of limitation, to a mindset
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of infinite possibilities. Our destiny as human beings is to be happy, powerful, joyful and blessed. The only limitations there are, really are the limitations we set for ourselves. Therefore, it is essential that you find out about the black magic of negative thinking. It is negative thinking, and, resulting from it, wrong action that created all the illnesses, all the hurts or deprivations you are suffering from right now.
Build a Positive Attitude It is not esoteric to have a positive mental attitude. It is directly related to, and connected with, our daily life experiences and relationships. We do not need philosophical speculations and concepts in order to adopt a positive attitude. To have more success and achieve more happiness is not a function of effort alone, nor even of intelligence. All our 33
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outward experiences are the result of our inner attitude projected onto the interface of real life: the world. Our thought today is our reality tomorrow, it’s as simple as that. Creative prayer helps to create positive reality in transforming our thought structures. Many of us are driven by negative inner scripts written in early childhood. Some of these inner programs, or some elements of them, may even have been imprinted on our mind during former existences. These inner programs drive us unconsciously and if they are negative, they bring about frustration and unsatisfying or even hurting life experiences. This is because inner programs are composed of thought patterns and emotional patterns which, since they are repetitive, hold us within a vicious circle of
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frustrating life experiences that in turn seem to justify or to confirm our negative worldview. Positive reality and success, happiness and fulfillment are not a chance; they are programmed! However, the will and intention alone to change our inner program are not enough. They are necessary for the start, and even the primary condition for it, but they cannot do all the work needed to erase decades or even centuries of negative selfprogramming. This is so because much of our inner program is unconscious. We are not aware of it and have the impression that all comes upon us from outside.
Forgive and Choose Therefore the first thing to do, once we really want to change, is to accept that we are not driven by outside forces or other people, 35
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but uniquely by ourselves. It means to admit that we are the only cooks of our destiny soup; which in turn means that we have to forgive others and ourselves, and this regularly, just like something we do naturally, like breathing. After forgiving we are open to access our inner program using relaxation and meditation or some form of spontaneous art to get connected to our subconscious mind. In the relaxed state then, we calmly recite our prayer, which deeply penetrates into our subconscious mind, especially if we repeat this procedure several times per day, and over a certain period of time. The problem for many of us is our lack of persistence. We tend to give up after a short while, assuming the method did not work because we did not see immediate results. Skep-
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ticism really is an impediment to personal growth. It leads to nowhere, or, yes, it leads to more skepticism. High achievement is easily brought about by an attitude that is humble, and somewhat childlike. I know that most people belittle this kind of attitude but not only does the Gospel call it the direct way to heaven, but it is in my observation also the attitude that most highly gifted people maintain. To enhance creativity and to boost our talents, there is nothing more productive than play. Our creativity is at its peak level when we play, just like children do. This is so because in this state of mind, the natural balance within our inner selves is restored because our inner parent and our inner adult are put at rest. It means that the inner criticizer, the naughty observer is not any more part of the game.
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This is of course a temporary condition, but a very important one, as every artist knows. We have to give our inner child this freedom of expression once in a while, and these are the moments of bliss every creator knows to tell a story about. Positive thinking leads to faith, a strong conviction that you will always attract the very best to you. Faith is not a mysterious grace fallen from heaven for select beings; it is available for everyone. It comes about not by chance, but by the constant intention to benefit others that is sustained and nourished by positive and empowering prayer.
Keep It Short Creative prayer works with mantra-like formulas that we repeat to ourselves in a relaxed state so that they become part of our unconscious thought pattern. Our overall mental at38
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titude reflects the program that we run in our subconscious mind. This program is composed of rational and irrational elements, and it seems that emotional content and generally what is related to pictorial thinking finds easier access to this part of our mind. Publicity exploits this fact very profitably. Creative prayer uses the greatly enhanced receptivity of the brain during the alpha state— a state where our brain runs on longer brain waves than usual—in order to trigger significant changes deep down in our subconscious mind. Humans are special in that they can recreate creation. They do it with their mind, using imagination as a tool. All our great artists, scientists and business people have shown that it is possible, long before we were talking about virtual reality, to create worlds within a
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world. And if we go through the biographies of very imaginative people, we can see that they have created their own world, a world that is usually quite different from the world of the common man who takes reality for granted.
Create Your Own Reality We have already asked the question ‘What is Reality?’ Now let us inquire further. Is reality a fixed concept that we can define and that is the same for all of us? My observation is rather that there are seven billion realities on this world, in every head one—or even more than one. If we take multiple personalities, we can see that their brain creates different worlds, one for every split self. Different personalities live in different worlds since they perceive reality in a different way. 40
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Quantum physics with its puzzling insight that the outcome of every experiment depends on the observer perspective corroborates this observation. There is a relativity theory which goes far beyond the one Einstein is credited with, or perhaps we have conceived Einstein’s observations in a much too limited fashion. What if this relativity theory was actually a universal concept in the cosmos, more than a mere science theory but a philosophical concept? You only need to remember how you see the world when you are angry, and how different it seems to you when you are content and happy. The inside and the outside are one! When we are black inside we encounter black outside. It is very strange but when we are filled with negative emotions, we encounter negative people, unlucky, unfortunate
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people, those who are mutilated, either physically or mentally. Yet when we are positive and happy, the world seems populated with angels. This is not a trick of our imagination. It is because we project our inside world toward the outside and thus re-create creation. We use to distinguish our emotional life from our mental life or mental attitude. In fact, the two are not separated. Or, to put it more precisely, the mental encompasses the emotional. The mental is the broader concept. It is directly linked to the universal or cosmic spirit. If we accept that our mental reality encompasses all our feelings and emotions, and also our irrationality, we can easily comprehend the idea that the inner reality is at the basis of all our shortcomings, like a seed which produces a monster or a wonderful landscape, a demon or an angel.
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Yet we have to go farther and see that the dualistic concept which distinguishes good and bad, white and black, yang and yin, male and female, is a concept as well, a product of our mind—and not the mind itself. The mind at its origin is pure and untouched, and it is the source of a multitude of virtual realities; it bears a potentiality full of beauty yet a beauty that we cannot grasp nor evaluate. However, we can program the mind to recreate its original creation—and thus achieve to change our mindset.
Change Your Inner Program All of us are driven by an inner program. This program is a mixture of heritage, upbringing and self-programming. Unfortunately for many of us, this program is more or less negative, thus blocking the realization of our evolutionary potential. 43
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Creative prayer erases or neutralizes the negative content of this program bit by bit, replacing it by a new and positive one. Our inner program is reflected by our selftalk. If we want to find out about it, we only have to watch our self-talk or self-thought-talk during one day. Many of us are not conscious of their selftalk. Perhaps you will be surprised, once you observe it, how negative it is, how cynical, disempowering, or how colored by guilt and fear. We can transform our self-talk, so that it serves to bring us forward instead of blocking us; we can change our inner black magician into a white magician. If we wait for others to empower us, we may wait a lifetime! We are at the root of our success or our failure, we are the carpenters of our house of
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life, and it will look outwardly exactly how we inwardly built it.
Be More Creative Many of us feel they need more creativity or spontaneity. They perform well within established ways and routines, but when it comes to invent, to create new forms, to change established routines, to open up new pathways of realization, they have difficulties and feel blocked or inhibited. This is predominantly the result of a mindset that is too much left-brain oriented, disregarding the wide range of creation potential situated in our right brain hemisphere. Our two brain hemispheres carry out different tasks and are organized in different ways. We reach our full creative potential only if we imply the right brain hemisphere in our
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thought processes and thus think with both sides of the brain simultaneously engaged. This means that our thought processes have to be coordinated so that they work as one whole integrated thought process that is based upon the harmonious functioning of the full brain. Learning and creativity are greatly enhanced from the moment we use the full brain. With our brain hemispheres it’s a bit like with the potentialities of two persons. We cannot say that one plus one equals two when we talk of two people brainstorming for new solutions. We all know that in this case we have a multiplication factor or potentiality factor built in the cooperation of these two people. In terms of human potential, one plus one can go up to thousands. Left hemisphere plus
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right hemisphere is not two, but perhaps millions.
Relax Properly Relaxation induces in our brain the socalled alpha state, a condition of higher receptivity, which brings about a higher level of coordination between our two brain hemispheres. This following overview over all our possible brain waves reveals that alpha waves are among the longer brain waves. The longest brain waves, predominant when we are in deep slumber and not dreaming are delta waves. They are 0.5 to 3 Hz per cycle. Second among long brain waves are theta waves, predominant when we are drowsy and drifting into sleep and dreams; they are 4 to 7 Hz per cycle. Now, we got the alpha waves which manifest when we are in a state of relaxation or meditation, and in the 47
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short interlude between wake and sleep; they are 8 to 12 Hz. Finally, among the short brain waves, we got the beta waves which are characteristic for our thinking activity, for our wake state, and for conversation; they are 13 to 30 Hz per cycle. Last not least, there are ultra short brain waves, called gamma waves, which are manifesting when our brain is in overdrive; they are 31 to 120 Hz. • Delta waves
0.5 – 3 Hz
Deeply asleep and not dreaming • Theta waves
4 – 7 Hz
Drowsy and drifting down into sleep and dreams • Alpha waves
8 – 12 Hz
State of relaxation or meditation • Beta waves
13 – 30 Hz
Busily engaged in activity or conversation • Gamma Waves
31 – 120 Hz
Hyper brain activity
In the state in which alpha waves are predominant in our brain, the two brain hemi-
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spheres have shown to be most coordinated. This means that our thought processes while we are in alpha are more integrated. When are we in alpha? Typically, in the interval between wake and sleep or, artificially induced, while we do relaxation. In alpha, typically our brain functions in a way that left and right brain hemispheres work together in synergistic cooperation. Creative prayer over time reorients the brain toward a more integrated functioning by dissolving the habit to function only on the left hemisphere, a habit we have been conditioned to by our left-brain oriented education and culture. The second element that favors wholebrain thinking is creative visualization, which actively involves our spatial and pictorial thought capabilities and helps our prayers to 49
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be accompanied by pictorial content. This makes for an integrated functioning of the two hemispheres during visualization because imagination is a right-brain quality while reciting the prayers, as it involves language, is per se a left-brain activity. Visualization therefore enhances imagination and stimulates the right-brain hemisphere to participate in the creative prayer process.
Become Spontaneous Creative prayer, last not least, enhances spontaneity. Spontaneity seems for many people something childish, something they think they can do without. Yet spontaneity is not only important in social life and on surprise parties, but it is a major factor in the process of creation. Without spontaneity, we always turn around in the same circles, we al-
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ways stick to the same procedures, we always trod the same old paths. Spontaneity typically means doing before thinking! Action without involving thought is more integrated and generally more holistic than thought-based action. I do not suggest that we can entirely live without thought and base our whole life on spontaneous action. To state this would be silly. What I am saying is that we need a creative balance between routine, on one hand, and spontaneous creation, on the other. Zen considers spontaneity as an essential part of a creative and happy life. The techniques Zen uses for spiritual growth and selfdevelopment are designed to block thought processes in order to free our potential for spontaneous creation and action.
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One of these techniques is the koan, a riddle-like tricky way of expressing truth, a way which is non-logical, non-rational or even impossible to grasp with thought. The koan tricks our mind to block thought or to go around the trap thought represents for true creativity. For someone who has never done Zen meditation, it seems at the beginning almost impossible to grasp the idea of the koan technique or to resolve even a simple riddle. This is not a question of intelligence! It is the way we use our brain and how we organize thought. Only if we get used to imply intuition in our thought processes, we can progress in Zen—and in life in general.
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Having practiced creative prayer for now about twenty years, I can say with conviction that, if pursued seriously and over a certain period of time, at least about three months, even deeply ingrained thought habits will begin to change. In addition, our thought process as a whole will be restructured, and creativity and spontaneous expression will be greatly enhanced so that inventive original thought can come up freely and lets us find new solutions to old problems.
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These solutions are often so simple and seem so evident that we may ask how we could not find them before? Relaxation can be done either progressively with physical exercises, or with music. I myself prefer relaxation with music because it has the special advantage to work easily for brain coordination. This can be done with physical exercises, too, but with a little more effort from the side of the participant. Musical relaxation insures that changes will be brought about effortlessly. Observing the lives of geniuses shows that they usually dislike hard and ineffective learning, which is perhaps why many of them drop out of school. And yet they typically learn ten times faster than average people.
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This is so because they develop their own learning techniques that bring learning and pleasure together; they derive pleasure from learning. That is one of several reasons why they are motivated for learning. We are always motivated to engage in doing what brings us pleasure. But there is more to motivation. Even if learning as such gives us pleasure, this pleasure will evaporate if the matter we want to learn is felt as boring or offtrack. How does creative prayer help to build learning motivation? When we practice creative prayer, we receive directly or after a while flashes of insight or we take spontaneous initiatives that show us what we are really interested in. It happens that people remember early interests or childhood interests they had
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completely forgotten about. Intuitively we know everything about ourselves, yet often we do not regard intuitions as a serious source of insight and knowledge. Our culture and educational systems do not favor this knowledge and even more or less destroy it.
Learning Motivation A very simple but powerful prayer for building learning motivation and ability is: Learning is easy and enjoyable for me.
Teaching Motivation For teachers, the corresponding prayer would be: Teaching is easy and enjoyable for me. The enthusiastic teacher, the one who teaches with joy and derives pleasure from
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teaching, conveys implicitly that the learning process is an exciting adventure, even without directly teaching learning skills. Anyway, what are learning skills for? No learning skill can relate the pleasure the learning process itself can provide, and no learning technique can build the motivation for learning. A technique is a technique, nothing more and nothing less. It is a tool for realizing something on a practical level.
Learning and Techniques Yet techniques do not generally affect our inner attitudes, our motivation, or our mental disposition. I do not talk now about mindtechniques, of course. I talk about techniques like a piano technique, a type-writing technique, a carving technique, a mathematical technique, and so on.
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For most of us learning was and is an experience directly related to techniques, to the learning of techniques. Yet learning at its origin is not something linked to a technique. And there are many forms of knowledge other than techniques. I think that learning motivation even evaporates if we concentrate exclusively on learning techniques. Practicing creative prayer, we develop natural confidence in our inner wisdom and its guidance, and we avoid over-stretching ourselves.
Self-Healing There are basic affirmations that open our inner potential. Once we are in deep relaxation and our mind is open and receptive, we can begin affirming:
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Every day and in every way, I am feeling better and better. This simple suggestion, developed by Dr. Émile Coué, effects miracles; he was one of the first pioneers of suggestive healing. In his hospital in Nancy, France, he let his patients repeat this powerful mantra while they were relaxed, and doing some repetitive activity such as sewing or embroidery.
Self-Acceptance This mantra can be varied. Here is a prayer for self-acceptance: Every day, in all respects, I approve more of myself. In fact, many people are at pains with accepting themselves. What happens if we do not entirely approve of ourselves? Well, in that
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case we continuously try to mold ourselves into others’ expectations or what we believe they expect from us. As a result, we are out of our center and cannot realize our full potential. In addition, we feel stressed and unhappy. The stress to comply with others’ needs can affect one’s health and even cause heart disease. A prayer for counteracting to this would be: I realize my full potential from inside out.
The Principle of Inner and Outer Harmony When I first got involved with scientific prayer, twenty years ago, reading Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1962/1982), I was especially moved by Dr. Murphy’s stressing the necessity to formulate our needs in a way to bring good not only to ourselves, but also to others. 60
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And I took this principle of harmony as my point of departure. In fact, I had encountered situations before that time that everybody except me would have considered as very unfortunate. All my friends asked me where I took my optimism from? But my faith in a good delivery seemed to win over their skepticism; after having done creative prayer for a few months, I heard from a growing number of persons, including my psychiatrist that I had ‘completely changed.’ I myself was not much aware of it, besides the simple fact that I felt better about myself. I namely had stopped to constantly judge and criticize myself as well as feeling guilty for some of my habits. Well-meaning friends also revealed to me that before this fundamental change, I had tried to justify myself to a point to apologize for my very existence. One said:
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‘It was up to a point that you tried to apologize for your mother having put you in the world.’
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Healing and self-healing are important issues in our times of turmoil, transformation and global change. Healing has a more universal connotation than mere curing a sickness. Whereas people, when their body is affected, may consult a physician and when they have a mental health problem go to a psychotherapist, they may hesitate to see anybody when they feel empty, depressed and bored with life. Depression is more complex and perhaps more dangerous than any physical ailment, and therefore it cannot be healed by palliative
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medicine. Some will see a spiritual healer, minister or counselor, but most will stay within their shell of mistrust that is in most cases the reason why they cannot get help. And this mistrust in turn is not a fancy but has well founded reasons in the past of these people. There may have been some form of abuse or a heavy loss of trust in life, and in people. There are wounds that need to heal but that often have never been identified since these wounds are invisible. The solution, then, can only come from our own inner source and not from outside sensegivers. But this source has to be found before this can happen; its existence must be acknowledged so that its healing powers can be activated. This means we have to connect to it, and by doing so get embedded in our
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original continuum. Thus healing is first of all self-healing. How to activate this self-healing process? How to trigger the process of linking back to our primary source of being, to the I-AM force in us? There are several ways. One of the easiest and certainly the most practical one is creative prayer. The fantastic thing about this technique is that it is similar to Lao-tzu’s famous wuwei or action through non-action. On the outside level, we really do nothing else but reciting some affirmations. But inside a lot is going to change. And this form of medicine, unlike most other medicine, has really no side effects. The most marvelous is perhaps that our inner wisdom is triggered and activated which means that— ‣
We attract every possible help we may need; 65
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We are freed from resistance to accepting this help;
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We are protected from becoming a victim of charlatans;
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We are peacefully freed from negative relationships;
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We are gradually building a new self-image.
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In the old myths and fairy tales the hero is a person who, through the patient mastering of all kinds of obstacles, got to gain the princess and the kingdom. He is rewarded because he achieved inner unity, symbolized by the princess, as well as outer standing, symbolized by the kingdom. All heroes are driven by an idea, be it marriage with the king’s daughter, be it the realization of some skill or mastership. The marriage, love and sexual fulfillment and the children as the fruit of this union symbolize the élan vital, the life force that animates the hero,
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his personal power or charisma, as we would say today, his self-confidence, his inner strength. It is the force that builds courage which in turn conquers fear and leads us to new horizons and achievements; it is our inherent power of renewal. Optimism mixed with a good portion of pride and unfettered self-confidence characterizes for example the Virtuous Tailor in the old German fairy tale. What in fact is self-confidence? Is it faith, and can it be enhanced through creative prayer? The etymology of the word is interesting. Self-confidence means confidence in the self. The self, as teaches Ramana Maharshi, is our guide, our true I-AM force. Self-confidence, it seems, is not pride let alone vanity, but simply faith. What myths and 68
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fairy tales convey us is nothing different from the wisdom that the religions teach: the best way is to found one’s life upon the direction that we receive through our higher self. Creative prayer is the easiest and most natural way to feed this faith constantly. Behold, faith does not negate our human emotions; it accepts and affirms them. It also accepts our weaknesses, our fears and doubts, knowing that our greatest weakness will be our greatest strength. The faithful person knows that negating the human nature is a defense, and is produced by fear. We could say that faith means to believe that we will win despite our fears and doubts, despite all that seems to be otherwise an obstacle on our way to victory. Faith helps to bring about this alchemical process in us. What is life other than a magic circle, a cir-
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cle that serves to fulfill certain tasks in order for us to progress on our evolutionary spiral? Reading fairy tales is revealing. They are highly initiatory and express eternal truths and wisdom in a beautiful picturesque language, a language that also children understand because it is non-intellectual and poetic. Fairy tales teach us that all masochistic worldviews and fundamentalist religious opinions are deeply wrong and that we are right, right from the beginning, in pursuing the desires of our heart. Fairy tales encourage us to work on ourselves to increase our strength, self-confidence and courage since these qualities are highly important to succeed in whatever we want to do. This is the reason why fairy tales are so important for children and adolescents. And they reach the deeper mind of our children
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much more directly than our ordinary language does because they are written in the language of poetry which is the language of the unconscious mind, the language of hypnosis, and the language of children. And it is the language of creative prayer. It is the language in which our various religious scriptures originally were drafted, be it the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas or others. This language is rich in symbols, simple in semantics and grammar, yet colorful and suggestive. It is the language of the old myths and sagas. When we listen to this language, it sounds organic, simple and powerful. But everyone who has tried to write it knows how difficult it is to convey the world of dream and occult mythology with ordinary words. Folk wisdom says one had to be born a poet. Yet people who either have successfully
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followed psychotherapy or found inner peace through prayer or meditation unanimously testify that the language of poetry once of a sudden begins to flow like water from a well. Gabrielle Carmi, an inspirational author from Switzerland, reports that she wrote her texts for the most part after long meditations and that these texts were, to her own surprise, written in a poetical imaginative language that she could barely identify as being her own, so different was it from her ordinary writing style. I do not say that we need a therapy to get there; whatever we use to become centered and find inner peace will produce amazing results, if only, as I pointed out in the beginning, we believe that this event is a probability and accept it as such. This means that we do not shut any door or exclude any potential outcome when we start with the prayers.
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If, for example, we prefer using relaxing music to get into a different state of consciousness, or we use colors, or we make spontaneous drawings, or else engage in automatic writing, it makes no difference. We all have preferences and should respect them, because all these different ways lead to the same source. A good way also is to paint or print a symbol on top of a page and then write a onepage impression about this symbol, a spontaneous text that simply expresses what the symbol triggered in our emotions and in our intuition. The themes and contents of such tales can reveal surprising inner truths; they in fact deliver messages from our subconscious mind. They often give hints to our present life situa-
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tion and can show new ways and solutions to problems that burden us. When we assume the power of our imagination, we will use it when we do creative prayer. However, since our capacity of imagination and visualization is individually very different, creative visualization is not a must. In fact, we can do without. While this may slightly retard the outcome of our prayers, the absence of visual images does not render creative prayer ineffective. The most important, to repeat it, is not visualization but relaxation before starting our daily prayer sessions. This is so because our brain is something like a bioelectric organism; it runs on frequencies, as we have seen already. Depending on the state of mind in which we are, the length of our bioelectric brain waves is different. For example, when
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we are fully awake, our brain works predominantly on beta waves. When we sleep, we are in theta or even delta. Particular attention merits the alpha state because when our brain works predominantly on alpha waves, it has certain very valuable characteristics: it is highly coordinated and extremely receptive. As the alpha state is the state in which we are between wake and sleep, we actually do not need to learn any sophisticated relaxation technique to get into alpha, except we want to induce the light trance at other times of the day. For this purpose, for example for creating art, doing brainstorming, or for finding new ideas, we may resort to any relaxation technique, such as progressive relaxation or relaxation with music.
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Progressive relaxation has been created in 1926 by Professor Jacobsen from Harvard University, USA. It is a technique that relaxes the mind through relaxing the body. It progresses step-by-step, hence the term, typically by relaxing an arm, then a leg, then the neck, the eye muscles, and so on. The secret behind this simple technique is what we today call biofeedback. When I want to relax, my mere will to relax is by far not enough to really get me into deep relaxation. I need my body to help me. The body helps by giving a feedback. So I simply tell my body what to do. I say: —When I relax my arm, I get a slightly hot sensation in the arm muscles. And the body responds by creating a warm sensation in your arm. Thus, the body feedback reinforces your intention to relax. When
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you feel hotter every time, you go on doing this with another limb of your body; this feedback greatly helps your mind to really relax, and focus. It’s a fantastic technique because it’s so simple and so effective. Its effectiveness comes from the fact that our body is intelligent. I myself prefer and practice relaxation with music simply because I have more experience with music than with psychosomatic techniques. This is so because I am a musician, first of all, before being a lawyer, writer or coach. This does not mean that I belittle Dr. Jacobsen’s technique, but I think it’s better to stick to what you really know. By simply playing some relaxing tunes on the piano, I was able once to hypnotize a classroom with more than fifty orphan children, during my working as a volunteer with
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orphans in Jamaica in 1988. After about fifteen minutes, all children had their heads on their arms and were found to be in deep slumber. And this was the case even with highly disturbed and insomniac children. As the German orphanage director could not believe what the teacher told her, she ran out of her office to see with her own eyes what she called ‘a miracle’. Highly self-managed persons who are free of bodily tensions and negative emotions are able to switch consciously their state of mind from beta to alpha, thereby opening their inner space for the reception of creative intuition, inspiration and a higher form of energy which is involved in creation. When we are relaxed, we can use one of the following prayers in order to build more
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self-confidence. Every prayer has to be repeated over and over again in the alpha state: PRAYER ONE
I am naturally, comfortably, and more and more sure of myself. PRAYER TWO
I feel more and more myself and selfsecured in every situation. PRAYER THREE
I trust my innate wisdom to realize all my gifts and talents.
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Here I would like to unfold a regard on how to realize inner peace. Many religions have tried to force peace upon man by dogma, prohibitions and punishment. Clerical and worldly forces have imprisoned the human animal in a set of tight rules, laws and prescriptions that resulted in rendering man a violent creature, full of contempt, rebellion, strife and turmoil. To get out of this net of obligations and the feeling of oppression that goes along with it, man is caught in an endless pursuit of pleasure. To make it worse, through the split in
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man’s mental and emotional setup as a result of the schizoid dualism that judging our emotions in good and bad ones brings about, man’s psyche is divided in a conscious or official part and an unconscious or unofficial one. Through the process of so-called civilization and primarily the school system with mass indoctrination and the disregard of the individual as a unique soul-being, humanity has in fact devoluted since the end of the great Minoan and other pre-patriarchal cultures of Antiquity, and evolution has made it only in the tiny range of technological advancement while in all other areas of life, we are today more barbarous than eight or twelve thousand years ago. The solution for world peace is entirely different from what clerical and worldly powers have ever taught us. In fact, only those who
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were considered as heretics, saints or prophets have told the truth. Buddha, when he was alive, found truth by human struggle and suffering, but after his death his teachings were perverted into their exact contrary. Through levitating the man Buddha into a god-like tower of virtue, the applicability of his teachings for us was eroded. And the same happened with the teaching of J. Krishnamurti who, in accordance with the Buddha, taught total freedom as the only viable modus vivendi at the root of man’s quest for sense and soul. To establish inner peace and peace in the outside world, we must first of all embrace all that is in us. This will enable us to embrace the world, and all-that-is. What happens when we repress certain desires or emotions and discard them from our
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awareness? We will lose sight over them and at the end they will take over control and dominate us. Inner peace can only be established if we make an end to our inner fight and overcome our fragmentation. Why should we make peace? What is the value of being in peace with oneself or others? I think that for many people peace is but a concept or a nice word or some kind of ideal but nothing they really give a priority in their lives. However, if you do not put energy in what you want to achieve, nothing will happen. It means we have to put energy into this wish, this very desire to be in peace with allthat-is. This simply means that, if we want something to grow, we have to care for the seed. We have to water the plant, put it in the sun or
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give some fertilizer. The same applies for our inner life. If we want to let something grow inside of us, we have to take care of the seed, water it and put it in the sun, the sun of our inner energy! Put some energy into peace also means to take some energy out of war, the war within ourselves, our inner struggles, and the war with others or what we call ‘circumstances.’ Circumstances are but reflections of our inner life, projected upon the interface of outward reality. From our inner state, the screen of our thought and our conscious and unconscious beliefs, energy irradiates into the universe that brings about changes; it drives us and others to various kinds of actions. Depending on the level of integration and harmony of our inner actors, the resulting actions are effective or ineffective, constructive
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or destructive, harmonious or disruptive. All those beliefs form a coherent projection system, something like a slide projector we carry inside of us. On this screen we project images, memories, fantasies and visions. We can control the outcome, the projection, by controlling our thought and our emotions. It is through this form of inner control that we handle intelligently our outer world and lives. I would like to recall the old Chinese general Sun-tzu who wrote the legendary book The Art of War. Sun-tzu who was a teacher not only of war but also of life said that in order to maintain peace we must prepare for war. This sounds like a paradox and seemingly is one. Sun-tzu knew that peace is not a static situation and that for establishing peace we need to constantly maintain a dynamic balance be-
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tween inner and outer forces. As such, peace can only be maintained through balancing those forces or energies. And this is again not something we do once forever, but which needs to be done at every moment, constantly, at every moment of our life, as a neverending task. This also means that we have to deal with everything in us and around us that is disturbing peace, by first of all taking it serious, and second, work on its integration. Taking inner struggles serious means to stop the struggle, the inner war, by giving a higher priority to inner peace. How, then, to stop the inner war? We stop the inner war by giving up moralistic concepts because those concepts make for inner war. Second, we do it by meditating about peace instead of staying with should’s and
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ought-to’s that moralistic upbringing has instilled in us. Meditating on peace does not necessarily mean to sit cross-legged for hours every day. It does not mean either to declare peace an ideal to strive after. Ideals are in practice as destructive as moralistic concepts and get us into inner conflicts instead of helping us to integrate conflicting opposites. Meditation means first of all acceptance of all our inner drives and conflicts and second, passive awareness. When we are truly attentive at every moment to the whole of our inner and outer life experience, new integrated solutions will come up that show us the way to peace. These solutions will come up spontaneously and intuitively. Intellectual constructs or mere reasoning will not lead us out of our inner chaos and fight. Nor will the big words of
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famous gurus, be they from a spiritual or a business background. The only guru that can truly help you is your inner guide, your true self. It is thus your task to find and connect to your self and to develop and allow its involvement in your daily thought and work.
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In this article we have seen that the ‘spiritual track’ is not necessarily the honest track, nor is it the track that leads to a transpersonal understanding of reality. Stan Grof, the founder of transpersonal psychology, has stressed that for developing an authentic spiritual understanding of life, it is paramount to get beyond social and cultural conditioning. This was the reason why Grof experimented several years with LSD and psychoactive drugs, because he saw that when humans get to strip off their conditioning, by whatever means, they are suddenly connected, totally
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and forever, with their inner being, their unique spiritual identity. And by being connected to their own atman, their own spirit guide, they are also connected with brahman, the universal spirit, the cosmic intention that is the creator force for the whole of the universe. The late Albert Hofmann, of Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, discoverer of LSD, was a naturally religious person, whose intention was to help us discover our own unique spiritual connectivity, without being sidetracked by organized religion and ideology. Terence McKenna, an explorer of reality, and parallel realities, came to exactly the same conclusions, as he asserted that looking beyond the fence of our cultural conditioning is a key element in true spiritual growth and evolution. When you remain on the level of
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the persona, the social mask, you cannot but follow your sense-givers, your religions, your ideological molds and concepts, and you are disconnected from your true mission and dharma. To connect with your soul reality, you need to unwind this social and cultural conditioning as much as possible. This does however not mean that you will end up as a clochard or hermit. It means that you remain questioning the outside reality you are facing, the culture in which you are embedded, the society of which you are a citizen. This quest, if it is honest and nonjudgmental, is individual and personal, and it’s a matter of peaceful transformation. It will not trigger a bloody revolution, nor will you go out to missionarize for your point 93
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of view. In this sense, this personal transformation, this revolution is, to use Krishnamurti’s words, psychological—and not political. I have shown in this essay that one of the most important elements in Life Authoring is creative prayer, a self-coaching technique that helped me heal the emotional scars originating from adverse childhood experiences, and a climate, in which I grew, that I felt as oppressive and manipulative. I have equally shown in this essay that creative prayer is not a religious concept and was not taken over from any religion; it doesn’t interfere with your religious concepts and it doesn’t sidetrack you from your particular religious worship and dogma. It is not normative in the sense that it doesn’t consider itself to be the only way there is for self-coaching, healing and building self-confidence.
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In this sense, it is humble enough to recognize that there are many ways to perceive reality, and that agnosticism is not to be frowned upon simply because it denies a god concept. Let me repeat here the perhaps most important reason why I talk about prayer, and not about auto-suggestion, self-suggestion, or auto-hypnosis. First of all, and despite of some overlapping, creative prayer is not to be confounded with auto-hypnosis. You are not going to hypnotize yourself when you repeat positive affirmations. You stay fully awake, while you are, and should be, relaxed. The overlapping here is that relaxation is indeed the first stage in the process of hypnotic induction, but only the first of several stages.
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That is why I speak of overlapping, but still the two techniques have nothing in common except that they start out with relaxation. So far, so good. However, there is well a difference between creative prayer and prayer concepts that involve a personal god. To stand for a god concept is a potential source of strife, and a potential source of antinomy. It is for that and other reasons that I chose to define prayer in a way to be valid even without a god concept. Without using such a concept, I however fully affirm that there is inner guidance, that there is a universal kind of intelligence, that there is a creator force, and that there is resonance and synergy in a universe that is conscious, responsive and holographic. Not many would have guessed just half a century ago that the scientific revolution
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would also bring about a religious revolution, and at the same time a psychological revolution. When we pray, we address that universal field, called the quantum field, the zero-point field, the quantum scale, or the quantum vacuum. While these scientific terms differ in some ways, what is basic to all of them is the fact that this universal field is both an energy field, and an information field. We have here, on the subatomic level, a convergence phenomenon set in place, where all experience in our universe can be described as a constant, multi-vectorial and complex energy and information flow that is instantly updated when any new information arises. Some speak of the Akashic field, or the Akasha library of emotional patterns, or the
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universal pattern library. Plato had perhaps the first vision of that field when he spoke about the eidós, the ideas. Hence, apart from the technique itself, that I have sufficiently explained in this article, it is important to behold that creative prayer is a modern technique to connect with our inner quantum field level, also called atman, in Hindu religion, the holy spirit of Christian religion, the indwelling spirit in the Sufi esoteric teaching, or the Buddha Nature known in Zen. In its functional usefulness, creative prayer is to be defined as a technique that helps inner healing, inner growth, soul expansion and soul healing, without having in any way the intention to replace the prayer that religions define and ordain for their followers. In fact, I have been reproached by some of those who know about my polyglot spirit that
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regarding creative prayer, I was unnecessarily restricting myself to a ‘Christian’ mindset, and that the method could not be possibly applied by people who adhere to other religious beliefs and dogmas. I strongly contradict. While Ernest Holmes and Joseph Murphy, the founders of the original method they called ‘scientific prayer’ were indeed focused upon a god-concept and applied the prayer technique they invented in that way, I was opposed from the start to their dogmatic views and for that very reason renamed the method into Creative Prayer. Later I found out to my surprise that the term is since long known in the Sufi tradition, which is the wisdom quest of Islam. I believe that not only Christians, but also Muslims, Jews and Buddhists, and even Taoists can
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practice creative prayer, precisely because the method is not based upon a particular religion, nor a god-concept. And let’s go up one level in the hierarchy of wisdom, and ask what prayer in fact represents? In other words, is prayer worship? Is prayer an expression of being signed up with a particular religious faith? It may be so inside of religions, but it’s not outside. In real life, prayer simply is a form of connecting with our inner source, our inner wisdom, our inner guide. Thus prayer is a wisdom quest just as the sweat-lodge is with native Americans, or sacrifice was for ancient religions, or regular tither is for the practicing Jew. And there is a reason why I called this method creative prayer.
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Psychoneuroimmunology delivered much evidence for the fact that mind and body are mere concepts; there is simply no such separation; body and mind are one, and there is intelligence in every cell, and our emotions are not in the brain, as modern psychology still wrongly believes, but in the human energy field. There is also our memory, as it’s a function of emotional flow, while the matrix is somehow reflected in the brain, but that is like the copy of an image. The image itself is contained in the aura or luminous body. This being said, I made it clear enough in this booklet that I refuse to ‘agnosticize’ my technique, calling it ‘auto-suggestion’ or the like because we are not machines, we are not mechanical devices, we are not ‘gadgets’ of nature, but spirit beings by nature. We are connected in the quantum field and religio
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simply means to connect with our primordial energy source. Prayer is not really an intellectual process. It’s actually your body talking to your body, your physical body talking to the complete body, which consists of seven layers of energy that have different density. Hence, prayer, in the sense not as religions use it, but in the sense of a psychological tool, is a way to connect with the quantum field, by sending out vibrations into the universe that return to us in the form of what we desire, be it money, wealth, love, relationships of value, business connections, good health, wellbeing, and so forth. That’s how it works, not more, and not less.
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Terms Alpha, Alpha State Our two brain hemispheres carry out different tasks and are organized in different ways. We reach our full creative potential only if we imply the right brain in our thought processes and thus think with both brain hemispheres simultaneously engaged. This means that our thought processes have to be coordinated so that they work as one whole integrated thought process. Not only learning but all our creative potential is greatly enhanced from the moment we use the full brain. relaxation induces in our brain the so-called alpha-state, a state of higher receptivity, which brings about higher coordination between brain hemispheres. In the state in which alpha waves (9-13 Hz) are predominant, the two brain hemispheres
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have shown to be most coordinated. When are we in alpha? Typically, in the interval between wake and sleep or, artificially induced, while we do relaxation. In alpha, typically our brain functions in a way that left and right brain hemispheres work in sync, through a process of synergistic and complementary cooperation. This greatly enhances memory and increases our overall learning capacities. Brain and Mind Research Latest consciousness research strongly suggests that mind and brain are not the same, but that the brain is something like an interface for the mind, and that, therefore, mind is the larger notion, and bears an essential connectedness with the whole of the universe and creation. This holistic view of the brain-mind replaces the former view that saw mind and brain as separated and that gave an undue importance and exclusiveness to the human brain in explaining cognition. Typically, this scientific residue paradigm was unable to explain extrasensorial perception (ESP) and generally, psychic phenomena.
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Besides, this general agreement, systems research has shed a particularly important light upon the relationship between mind and brain. Fritjof Capra explains in his book The Web of Life (1997) that still back in 1994 the editors of an anthology titled Consciousness in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience stated frankly in their introduction: ‘Even though everybody agrees that mind has something to do with the brain, there is still no general agreement on the exact nature of this relationship.’ He then explains that science was held by Descartes’ assumption that mind is a thing, the ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans). However, systems research has brought to daylight that mind is not a thing but a process—the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life itself. Capra then explains that the brain simply is the structure through which this process of cognition operations. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore is one between process and structure. Capra finally adds that the entire structure of the organism participates in the process of cognition whether or not the organism has a brain and a higher nervous system. (Id., 175-176). 105
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—David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (2002) and Thought as a System (1994), Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000), Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (1982/ 1987), The Web of Life (1996/1997), The Hidden Connections (2002), Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain (1985) and The Holotropic Mind (1993), Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (1992), Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe (1995), Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe (1997), Lynne McTaggart, The Field (2002), Hameroff et. al, Consciousness: 20 Scientists Interviewed, DVD (2003).
Cartesian Science and Worldview A Cartesian or Newtonian worldview is a life philosophy marked by a dominance of deductive and logical thinking to the detriment of the qualities of the right brain such as associative and imaginative thinking, and generally fantasy. It’s also a worldview that tends to disregard or deny dreams and dreaming, extrasensorial, multisensorial perception and ESP faculties, as well as genuine spirituality. The term Cartesian has been coined from the name of French philosopher René Des-
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cartes. While nature is coded in energy patterns, Cartesian scientists deny the cosmic energy field as a ‘vitalistic theory’; they have split mind and matter into opposite poles. Historically, and philosophically, it was not René Descartes who has been at the origin of this schizoid worldview, but the so-called Eleatic School, a philosophical movement in ancient Greece that opposed the holistic and organic worldview represented by the philosophy of Heraclites; but it was through the affirmation and pseudo-scientific corroboration of the ancient Eleatic dualism that in the history of Western science, the reductionist approach to reality, which is actually a fallacy of perception, became the dominant science paradigm between approximately the 17th and the 20th centuries. We are right now at a point in time where this limited worldview is gradually being overcome and replaced by the novel insights of quantum physics, systems theory, and a new holistic science paradigm that connects us back to the oldest of wisdom traditions.
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Consciousness Consciousness basically consists of three major elements: Perception, Information Processing, and Energy. The most important part of my scientific observation of consciousness is that it contains energy, the information field, or human energy field, so that energy must be seen as a constituent part of it, next to perception and information processing. In Western scientific history, the energy part of consciousness has been consistently blinded out from scrutiny and occulted, to a point that in modern society, there is a huge knowledge gap about the human energy field as a result of this cultural and religious prohibition of the ‘tree of knowledge.’ Consequently, my consciousness research is focused upon bringing in the missing links so as to arrive at a unified field of integrative perception and thus a coherent model of consciousness. —David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (2002), Thought as a System (1994), Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000), Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (1987), The Web of Life (1997), The Hidden Connec-
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tions (2002), Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe (1995), Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain (1985), The Holotropic Mind (1993), The Three Levels of Human Consciousness (1993), Hameroff, Newberg, Woolf, Bierman, Ramachandran, Chalmers, Consciousness: 20 Scientists Interviewed, Director: Gregory Alsbury, 5 DVD Box Set (2003), Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe (1997), Lynne McTaggart, The Field (2002), Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (1992).
Creative Visualization Creative Visualization is based on the insight that through thought forms and emotional patterns, we impact upon the outer world, be this influence positive or negative. Thus creative visualization helps us achieve higher by teaching correct thinking and right action, by changing our thoughts so as to bring them in alignment with cosmic intention. Creative visualization ideally accompanies creative prayer and can be said to be a basic technique underlying positive thinking. It is frequently used by athletes to enhance their performance.
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For example, a golfer may visualize the ‘perfect’ stroke over and over again to mentally train muscle memory. It can also be used to attract certain positive events or to find the right partner or business partner. Creative visualization is different from daydreaming in only one respect, namely that it is intentional and purposeful. Creative visualization is increasingly used in modern psychotherapies, for stress relief and for curing psychosomatic diseases. Direct Perception Direct Perception is the primary mode of learning that nature applies in evolution. Direct perception is the mode the human brain uses to receive and store information in its capacity as a passively organizing system. The child learns his or her first language through direct perception, the picking-up of whole patterns, using the integrative and associative mode of the right brain. Obedience and imitation are not the appropriate means to develop the human potential; therefore civilization can only function on an outside or superficial level, but not as a motor of integrating man into a truly functional power unit that is operating on all levels at once.
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The mainstream educational system has put this natural intelligent and holistic learning mode upside down in forcing children to learn with their left brain hemisphere only, cutting off the necessary mode of synthesis provided by the right brain hemisphere. This is the single major reason why the modern educational system, while it is very costly, is totally ineffective, and brings about people who are alienated from their own inner source, out of touch as they are with their innermost human potential. This also is the reason for the astonishing lack of creativity in the corporate world, that the world-famous coach and corporate trainer Edward de Bono deplored in his books. Emotional Intelligence Emotional Intelligence is one of the four types of intelligence, which are logicalrational intelligence, emotional intelligence, graphical-spacial intelligence and tactile intelligence. Emotional intelligence is especially active when it goes to understand relationships, human affairs, and the psychological implications within them. —Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1995).
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I Ching The I Ching or Book of Changes is the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. A symbol system designed to identify order in what appear to be chance events, it describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is at the heart of Chinese cultural beliefs. It is based on the alternation of complementary energies called Yin and Yang, which are developmental poles that by their alternation trigger inevitable change. It is also based on the old integrative philosophy of the five elements that is part of many other esoteric science traditions. The philosophy centers on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change. The I Ching consists of 64 hexagrams. Each hexagram or kua is an energy pattern that is a unique mix of the two base energies, yin and yang, represented symbolically by lines. Yang is represented by a solid line, yin by a dotted line. Each hexagram is composed of six lines, and two trigrams consisting of three lines each. The lower trigram deals with matters that are in their beginning stage, from the start of a project until about half of its realization. The upper trigram deals with the culmination and the 112
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end of processes or projects, positively or negatively. The I Ching has been a book for divination and relief, and for spiritual learning for many great and famous people such as Confucius, Hermann Hesse, John Lennon, Carl Gustav Jung, and many others. I personally consult the I Ching on a regular basis since 1990, as well as Astrology and the Tarot since the 1980s. —Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes (1967), Helmut Wilhelm, The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes (1995), HuaChing Ni, I Ching: The Book of Changes and the Unchanging Truth (1999), Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching (1998), Richard Wilhelm & Charles Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes (1967), John Blofeld, The Book of Changes (1965), Thomas Cleary, The Taoist I Ching (1986), R.L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook (1984).
Inner Selves GENERALITIES
Inner Selves are energies in our psyche that form part of our total and integral wholeness. In the ideal case, they should be bal113
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anced and in harmony with each other. This means that all inner selves ideally should work in sync, as a sort of inner team, in which all members are fully awake and communicate with each other. In most people’s psyche, however, the inner child is somnolent or asleep, and either the inner parent or the inner adult dominate the psyche. While the truth about our inner selves goes back to Antiquity, the insight in modern times has been made fruitful for psychiatry through Eric Berne in 1950, the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA). He recognized three essential inner selves: Inner Child, Inner Parent and Inner Adult. In my own research and work with the inner dialogue, I encountered the presence of additional entities such as the Inner Controller or Inner Critic as the instance in the psyche that represents the societal, cultural and moral values that we have internalized through education and early conditioning. If the Inner Critic hijacks the psyche, we are unable to realize our love wishes, nor can we be creative. In addition to these inner selves, I encountered an entity of superior wisdom that I called Lux and a shadow entity I called Sad King and which embodied repressed emotions that had turned into sadistic drives.
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INNER CHILD
Inner Child is a psychic entity, partpersonality, or psychic energy, created between our 7th and 14th year of life, and that is part of our inner triangle. Positively, the inner child energy is primarily emotional and wistful, predominantly creative. It is the motor of every human being’s creativity. It can be said to be the creative motor, the very source energy in humans that makes that we can be spontaneous, creative and sometimes a little mad, to go beyond the limiting framework of the rational and repetitive mind. Negatively, the inner child is either mute or cataleptic so that its energy cannot manifest, or else its energy is dominant in the psyche or turned upside-down which makes an inner child that is rebellious, capricious, willful or overbearing, producing the ‘clochard’ personality, the ‘hippie’, the ‘anarchist’, the ‘eternal student’ and abuser of the social system. INNER ADULT
Inner Adult is a psychic entity, partpersonality or psychic energy that represents our logical thinking, our reason, our maturity. Positively, it makes for our balanced decisions, our down-to-earth attitude and our sense for daily responsibilities. Negatively, the inner adult manifests as the 115
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intellectual nerd or through emotional frigidity, cynicism or an obsession to measure human relations on a scale of reasonableness or straightness without considering the emotional dimension. The dominant inner adult energy plays a major role in modern education where it results in devastating damage on the next generations’ emotional integrity. The dominant inner adult also produces the ‘professional skeptic’, the obnoxious ‘total rationalist’ who considers ten percent of the human nature as predominantly important, flushing the other ninety percent down the toilet! INNER PARENT
Inner Parent is a psychic entity, partpersonality or psychic energy that represents our inner value standards, our moral attitudes, our caring for self and others, but negatively also our judging others, our Iknow-better attitude or blunt interference into the lives of others without regard for their privacy. The dominant inner parent energy plays a recurring role in tyrannical and persecutory societal, religious and political systems. INNER TRIANGLE/INNER TEAM
The term inner triangle or inner team is an expression that denotes two things. First, it
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is a summary of the main inner energies, the inner child, inner adult and inner parent who can be seen to be in a triangular relationship. Second, the expression also suggests that there should be balance or harmony between these inner entities so that neither of them dominates the psyche and that they react flexibly, not in a stiff manner, to any events that arise, or in communications with the outside world. INNER DIALOGUE
The inner dialogue is a technique to get in touch with our inner selves through relaxation or self-hypnosis and subsequent dialogues with one or several of our inner selves, in a state of light trance. The state of light trance can be self-induced, with no facilitator needed, and outside of a psychotherapy. The inner dialogue should ideally be fixed on paper, at least in the beginning, because the voices that come up are very soft and writing down the dialogues helps to keep focus. The technique is also called Voice Dialogue, for example by Stone & Stone, in their book Embracing Our Selves (1982). However, the expression could mislead novice users as the ‘voices’ are not really voices of course, as they are not to be heard with our ears, but something like flashes of intuition, or sudden precisely
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formulated thoughts that seem to come ‘from nowhere.’ Intuition Intuition is inner knowledge that typically manifests spontaneously and that is all-wise and non-judgmental, broad in scope and wistful; typically, intuition is transpersonal in intent, not ego-based, thus manifesting something like cosmic intention. In the old wisdom traditions, intuition was more highly valued than in modern consumer culture; it was typically called ‘the knowledge of the heart.’ Koan Zen Buddhists learn the art of holistic dialogue. The whole of Zen training puts a stress on the fallacies inherent in mere verbal communication; the koan system they developed is a unique way of transmitting truth nonverbally. Zen considers spontaneity as an essential part of a creative and happy life. The techniques Zen uses for selfdevelopment are designed to block thought processes in order to free humans’ potential for spontaneous creation and action. The Koan is a way to get to directly
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experience truth, by circumventing the thought interface. This is how the nonlogical, non-rational and emotional realms can be integrated. Koans are riddles which are meant to make the student of Zen realize the limitations of logic reasoning. The irrational wording and paradoxical content of these riddles make it impossible to solve them via the thought process. Hence, they are designed precisely to stop the thought process and make sure the student uses intuition, directly experienced truth, for the direct perception of reality. Life Authoring People generally know what authoring is, as for example authoring a book. But can one author one’s life? While this sounds somewhat queer and pretentious, I have thoroughly tested it before I came to present it as a self-coaching method that facilitates self-healing, by helping overcome an early abuse trauma, healing depressions, and it helps realizing unused talents, virgin potential, or an ‘old dream.’ I designed three concise elements, techniques or activities in life authoring. None
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of them was invented by myself, but I have developed them into elements of a coherent system of tools, or method. They should be done simultaneously, and on a daily basis for the time of at least one month. The day should be started and ended by 5 to 15 minutes of Creative Prayer, then Story Writing should by preference be done in the morning, and Voice Dialogue and Spontaneous Art in the late afternoon or evening. Quantum Physics DEFINITION
Quantum Physics or quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of theoretical physics with wide applications in experimental physics that replaces classical mechanics and classical electromagnetism for the subatomic realm. It is the underlying mathematical framework of many fields of physics and chemistry, including condensed matter physics, atomic physics, molecular physics, computational chemistry, quantum chemistry, particle physics, and nuclear physics. Along with general relativity, quantum mechanics is one of the pillars of modern physics.
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THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
The once certain basic assumptions about life, that were the pillars of Cartesian science, were replaced by uncertainty. It was by Werner Heisenberg that this oftenquoted uncertainty principle was established in physics, and notoriously much to the exasperation of Albert Einstein who reportedly objected ‘God does not play dice!’ And it was perhaps through Werner Heisenberg that quantum physics was established as a science. Vidette Todaro writes in her elucidating study The Enigma of Energy (1991): VIDETTE TODARO-FRANCESCHI
It was but one small leap from the uncertainty principle and the dual wave-particle character of matter to physicist Niels Bohr's theory of complementarity. He proposed that on the quantum level nothing can be divided into discrete parts. Everything is related; everything complements everything else. Since it is impossible to completely predict outcomes on a quantum level, we are forced to look at the whole. Furthermore, Bohr illuminated the philosophical issues entwining complementarity in the quantum physics world with psychic
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experience and the study of living organisms in general. The simple fact is that everything is inseparably connected. (Id., 37). This has done us a lot of good because this is more than just physics. It’s life. What impact this new worldview can have upon healing, Dr. Villoldo recognized and explained it in his bestselling book Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000). He writes: ALBERTO VILLOLDO
Physicist Werner Heisenberg developed a key principle of quantum mechanics: that one could determine either the velocity or the position of an electron accurately, but not both. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the act of observing an event influences its outcome or destiny. Heisenberg's discovery seems to indicate that the ability to change the physical world through the exercise of vision is very limited once energy has manifested into form. The time to change the world is before form has emerged from the formless, before energy has manifested into matter. Thus many of the healing practices developed by shamans heal conditions before they manifest in the body, before old imprints in the Luminous Energy Field have organized matter into illness or misfortune. (Id., 131).
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NONLOCALITY
Another basic discovery of quantum physics is nonlocality. Nonlocality means that effects be triggered by element A in element B without element A and element B having any form of physical connection. They can in fact be light years away from each other. Nonlocality, then, is not bound to relativity, and effects therefore are not a function of the speed of the light nor any higher velocity; in other words, they are instantaneous. The term used for nonlocal effects is entanglement or quantum entanglement. An alternative explanation was given by Rupert Sheldrake who explains nonlocal effects by morphic resonance. As I am not a physicist, I will quote Dean Radin, who writes in his book Entangled Minds (2006): DEAN RADIN
At a level of reality deeper than the ordinary senses can grasp, our brains and minds are in intimate communion with the universe. It’s as though we lived in a gigantic bowl of clear jello. Every wiggle—every movement, event, and thought—within that medium is felt throughout the entire bowl. Except that this / particular form of jello is a rather peculiar medium, in that it’s not localized in
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the usual way, nor is it squishy like ordinary Jell-O. It extends beyond the bonds of ordinary spacetime, and it’s not even a substance in the usual sense of that word. Because of this nonlocal Jell-O in which we are embedded, we can get glimpses of information about other people’s minds, distant objects, or the future or past. We get this not through the ordinary senses and not because signals from those other minds and objects travel to our brain. But because at some level of our mind/brain is already coexistent with other people’s minds, distant objects, and everything else. To navigate through this space, we use attention and intention. From this perspective, psychic experiences are reframed not as mysterious ‘powers of the mind’ but as momentary glimpses of the entangled fabric of reality. Particles that are quantum entangled do not imply that signals pass between them. Entanglement means that separated systems are correlated. (Id., 263-264). As quantum physics really is a prototypical example of complexity in action, the literature I recommend is not limited to the explanation of quantum mechanics in the strict sense.
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Jeffrey Satinover’s book The Quantum Brain (2001) artfully weaves quantum mechanics, neuroscience and psychiatry into one epic tale of grandiose dimensions that offers a broad outlook on the possibilities of a future humanity. The book is a good example how poetic a scientist may become when he thoroughly gets involved with quantum mechanics. And the interesting thing about Satinover is that he is a trained psychiatrist and only in a 2nd life study cycle has become a quantum physicist. This is extraordinary in itself! Another book, which I have reviewed, is Deepak Chopra’s Life After Death (2006), a book that is apparently only about life after death, but it’s also about quantum physics, as without our discovery of quantum physics, this book could not have been written, because most people simply would not understand and accept a truth that runs counter to the teachings of 2000 years of Christianity. The success of this book is in my view not due to Chopra’s fame and popularity. Quantum physics has opened certain pathways in our brain that before were lying dormant in the sense of looking at the world. The precepts of quantum mechanics all compound in demonstrating that there is more to visual reality, that there is a
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reality out there, and within us, that is not tangible, and that all physics paradigms before quantum mechanics simply could not explain. This has opened our view to dimensions that are highly paradoxical if we look at them with our conditioned mind. Hence the need to change our entire viewpoint in the cognitive assessment of reality. This involves then, forcible also, the domain after death, and the fate of the soul. —Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (1975/2000), Deepak Chopra, Life After Death (2006), Russell DiCarlo, A New Worldview (1996), Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe (1995), Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field (2004), Lynne McTaggart, The Field (2002), Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science (1995), Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (1992), Russell Targ, Miracles of Mind (1999), Vidette TodaroFranceschi, The Enigma of Energy (1999).
Self It is important to clarify the notion of Self, which is ambiguous, used in different ways by different people, and by different religions. To begin with, the Self needs to be distinguished from the ego. While it is generally true that the ego isolates and suffo126
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cates human creativity in an ego-bound shell, this is not true for the Self as the greater notion. In this sense the Self contains the ego, but not vice versa. The Hindu notion of atman as the higher self that is considered as an outflow of the universal spirit or oversoul, brahman, may be a good conceptual aid. It is in this sense that the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi uses the notion of self and this comes very close to my own idea of selfhood. However, my idea has been influenced also strongly by the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. In Jungian psychology, the self is the archetype symbolizing the totality of the personality. It represents the striving for unity, wholeness, and integration. As such, it embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious. Soul Power Soul Power, which I synonymously call Primary Power or Self-Power is a concept I have created to connote our original power, and which is distinct from the harmful secondary powers or worldly powers that profoundly mark our current society, and which are clearly violence-inducing, and in the long run damaging the human potential and natural human spirituality. 127
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Synchronicity Synchronicity is a term attributed to CarlGustav Jung; it may be of older and perennial origin. It is a quite handy expression that connotes that two apparently unrelated events are behaving in sync, in a sense of being linked by an information field. In fact, what was found by research is that such information fields truly exist. When two particles are linked in an information field, that is, entangled, they behave exactly in the same way, be they light years away from each other. How we explain this with terms like quantum connectivity, a ‘holographic’ universe or morphogenetic resonance is of secondary importance; the fact cannot be denied and has been observed in all experiments of quantum mechanics. Synchronistic events are typically increasing when emotional tension and release are high, which often occurs during therapy and cathartic events. Typical examples are given by all our famous psychoanalysts, as by Jung himself. One of his patients for example suffered from a phobia against frogs and on the last day of the therapy, when a breakthrough was reached, and the patient finally utters that she can now meet any frog without panic, a frog was sitting on the window sill of the psychiatric practice. This 128
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is a case for synchronicity because the two events are not just randomly connected, but are intelligently linked in an information field and thus are to be considered as synchronistic. —Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (1992), Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe (1995), Lynne McTaggart, The Field (2002), Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections (2002), Valerie Hunt, Infinite Mind (2000), Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field (2004), Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (1995), Ken Wilber (Ed.), Quantum Questions (2001).
Taoism, Tao Taoism is a philosophical school from ancient China. One of its foremost sources are the Tao Te Ching, by Lao-tzu. Tao means path or way, but in Chinese religion and philosophy it has taken on abstract meanings. Some of the foremost qualities that characterize Taoism are a non-biased and nonjudgmental mindset, acceptance of all-thatis, including the world, integration of emotions, magnanimity, patience and tolerance toward the uneducated and ‘brute’ and the
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‘perverse’ majority of humans who are caught in innumerable projections due to their refusal to face what-is and their entanglement in possessions, status and timebound concepts. Lao-Tzu is considered, together with Chuang-tzu, as the primary representative of Taoism. Very similar to Taoism is Chang Buddhism, which after its propagation in Japan was termed as Zen. Like Taoism it is a philosophical school that warns of the conceptual trap by saying in a metaphor that the finger that points to the moon is not the moon. Both philosophies stress the importance of daily life as a plane of sharpening the mind through developing attention. Tarot The Tarot de Marseille is one of the standard patterns for the design of tarot cards. It is a pattern from which many subsequent tarot decks derive. Research showed that the Tarot deck was invented in northern Italy in the fifteenth century. The name Tarot de Marseille is not of particularly ancient vintage; it was coined in the 1930s by the French cartomancer Paul Marteau, who
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gave this collective name to a variety of closely related designs that were being made in the city of Marseille in the south of France, a city that was a centre of playing card manufacture. The Tarot de Marseille is one of the standards from which many tarot decks of the nineteenth century and later are derived. Like other Tarot decks, the Tarot de Marseille contains fifty-six cards in the four standard suits. Divining with the Tarot can be done in similar ways as consulting the I Ching, using serendipity (or the help of our unconscious mind) to determine a set of correlated cards that give an answer for a particular outcome or question. However, unlike other divinations, the Tarot is psychological in the sense that cards, at least the great arcana, are archetypal images and need interpretation. This is not always an easy task and can be subject to error and misinterpretation. Yin-Yang The primordial energy, when working on the earth plane, manifests itself in a dualistic form, as two complementary energies, called yin and yang. Both of the energies can be associated with certain characteristics. However, it would be wrong to identify
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yin with female and yang with male. It is not that simplistic. Yin can well be associated with the female principle but this does not mean that it is identical with it. It’s actually a bit like in the cabalistic system. We talk about corresponding characteristics or elements, and the system as such is one of corresponding relationships. Yin can be said to correspond with the female principle, the passive, receptive, soft and dark, water, clouds, the moon, the tiger, the turtle, the color black, the north, lead, the direction down or a landscape that is flat, as well as even numbers. Yang can be said to correspond with the male principle, the active, creative, bright and hard, fire, the sun, the colors white and red, the dragon, mercury , the direction up or with a landscape that is mountainous, as well as odd numbers. What that means is that for example yin moves towards its fullness in order to culminate and swap its nature into yang. Yang, when it culminates, becomes yin. That is why we can say change is programmed into the very essence of the yin-yang dualism and thus, change cannot be avoided. We can even go as far as saying that the very fact of change is the proof that we deal with 132
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a living thing. If there is no change, there is no movement and, as a result, no life. Life is change, living movement. This is what the nature of life teaches us. Zen The Japanese word Zen comes from the Chinese ch’an which in turn has its origins in India. The establishment of Chan (Zen) is traditionally credited to the Indian prince turned monk, Bodhidharma. —Roshi Philip Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen (1967), Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (1971), Trevor P. Leggett, A First Zen Reader (1972), Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (1989), Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (1999).
The meaning of Zen may be meditation; however the deeper and more mystical interpretation is that Zen means ‘revelation’ or ‘enlightenment’. Zen emphasizes dharma practice and experiential wisdom, particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen, in the attainment of awakening. As such, it putatively de-emphasizes both theoretical knowledge and the study of religious texts in favor of direct, experiential realization. 133
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Zen is within the Buddhist tradition, but it’s not really a practice that is ‘religious’ in the sense of Buddhist religion. It’s rather a down-to-earth, practical and all about selfempowerment in the everyday routine of ordinary life. None of these are emphasized by traditional Buddhism. One doesn’t need to be a Zen master or monk to practice Zen. Suffices to start with a desire to be a complete novice with the ‘beginner’s mind‘—a clean slate. Practicing Zen means to clear the mind from material clutter, stripping thoughts away to the point of ‘realization’—an all-embracing awareness. This realization or awakening is known as wu in Chinese, and satori or kensho in Japanese. Besides meditation, Zen uses the Koan, riddle-like poems, to scramble the intellectual and conceptual mind and to bring about a state of innocent and fresh awareness. Koans are enigmatic little or question-and-answer dialogues that can be used to prompt to help understand the Zen approach to enlightenment. Scholars and followers of Zen say you don’t need words to explain Zen. It is all about a direct experience of the ‘here and now,’ with an empty mind—what Zen practitioners call ‘nomind’. In its free-form minimalist approach,
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Zen is wholly concerned with the self and with finding reality through realization. —See: James Harrison, Endless Path Zen, London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2006.
Personalities Berne, Eric Eric Berne (1910–1970) was a Canadianborn psychiatrist best known as the creator of Transactional Analysis (TA). He published both technical and mass-market books on the subject. In the early 1960s he published both technical and popular accounts of his conclusions. The bestselling book Games People Play made terms like scripts and tokens part of the ordinary vocabulary. His Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups examined the same analysis in a broader context than one-on-one interaction. His seminar group from the 1950s developed the term Transactional Analysis (TA) to describe therapies based on his work. By 1964, this method expanded into the International Transactional Analysis Association. Many therapists have put his ideas in practice. Other applications have appeared in the 135
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practice of organization development consultants. By 2003 the various TA organizations boast over 15,000 worldwide members. Berne was famous for his use of ordinary, easy-to-understand words instead of psychiatric terminology. Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Siddhartha Gautama (563 BC–483 BC) was a spiritual teacher from Ancient India who became the founder of Buddhism. He is generally recognized by Buddhists as the Supreme Buddha of our age. Gautama, also known as Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakyas, is the key figure in Buddhism, and accounts of his life, discourses, and monastic rules are believed to have been summarized after his death and memorized by his followers. Various collections of teachings attributed to Gautama were passed down by oral tradition, and first committed to writing about four hundred years later. The Zen tradition, while today often seen as detached from Buddhism, was originally founded as a specific branch of Buddhism in China, called Chan Buddhism. When this tradition came to Japan, it was called Zen, and this name has survived until today.
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Confucius Confucius (551–479 BC) was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher, whose teachings and philosophy have deeply influenced East Asian life and thought. His philosophy emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity. These values gained prominence in China over other doctrines, such as Legalism or Taoism during the Han Dynasty. Confucius’ thoughts have been developed into a system of philosophy known as Confucianism. It was introduced to Europe by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who was the first to Latinize the name as Confucius. His teachings are known primarily through the Analects of Confucius, a collection of ‘brief aphoristic fragments’, which was compiled many years after his death. Modern historians do not believe that any specific documents can be said to have been written by Confucius, but for nearly 2,000 years he was thought to be the editor or author of all the Five Classics such as the Classic of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals.
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Descartes, René René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’, and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes’ influence in mathematics is also apparent, the Cartesian coordinate system allowing geometric shapes to be expressed in algebraic equations being named for him. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system, Descartes founded analytic geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis. His most famous statement is: Cogito ergo sum. The Cartesian system of thought, philosophy and science is today generally questioned. One of the most prolific science authors who is now world-famous, offering in his books a comprehensive critique of Cartesian thought and its limitations, is the physicist and author Fritjof Capra. 138
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Einstein, Albert Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a Germanborn theoretical physicist widely considered one of the greatest physicists of all times. He formulated the special and general theories of relativity. In addition, he made significant advancements to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. While best known for the Theory of Relativity, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his 1905 explanation of the photoelectric effect and ‘for his services to Theoretical Physics’. In popular culture, the name Einstein has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius. —Joyce Goldenstein, Physicist and Genius (1995), Albert Einstein, The World As I See It (1993), Out of My Later Years (1993), Ideas and Opinions (1988), Albert Einstein Notebook (1989).
Freud, Sigmund I was first reading Sigmund Freud (1856– 1939), in its German original edition, back in 1975, upon entering law school. Freud’s theory that children’s psychosexual development was a process of libidinal (erotic) identifications with first the same-sex parent 139
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(homosexual identification), and then with the other-sex parent (heterosexual identification), passing through the oral and anal stages for finally arriving at the genital stage—is an attractive surrogate for the real knowledge! Freud was the avatar for what later became, and today still is, the mainstream paradigm in child psychology and education. One of the pitfalls of this paradigm is the denial or exclusion of parameters that serve to build identity through self-knowledge, intuitive or inner knowledge, paranormal knowledge, pre-life knowledge and relational experience. The identity that is said to be the only possible one according to mainstream psychiatry is a derived, not a genuine, identity. It is derived from the parents’ identities. For a boy, the process will be identification with the father, as a primary homosexual identification, during the anal phase and identification with the mother, as a secondary heterosexual identification during the genital phase. According to Freud, the so-called Oedipus Complex comes in at that moment in the child’s psychosexual development. True identity is built, according to this theory, when the boy has successfully liquidated the Oedipus Complex by having developed 140
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enough aggressiveness toward the father and enough castration of his incestuous desire toward the mother at the same time. Heraclitus Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC), was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor. Heraclitus was the first person of the Western world to create a holistic philosophy and who recognized the importance of flow in all living organisms, thus anticipating modern systems theory for more than two thousand years. Jesus of Nazareth Jesus (8–2 BC/BCE to 29–36 AD), also known as Jesus of Nazareth, is the central figure of Christianity. He is commonly referred to as Jesus Christ, where Christ is a title derived from the Greek christós, meaning The Anointed One, which corresponds to the Hebrew-derived Messiah. The name Jesus is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself believed to be a transliteration of the Hebrew Yehoshua or Aramaic Yeshua, meaning YHWH is salvation.
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Jung, Carl Gustav Carl Jung’s approach to psychoanalysis had a strong impact on my understanding of psychoanalysis. The first text I was reading by Jung was a rather esoteric essay, Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy, and it showed me the depth of Jung’s research into even highly esoteric topics. Soon I became aware that Jung was going to cover that area that I found was missing out in the other authors’ view upon the human psyche, that is, the spiritual dimension. After having read Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, The Myth of the Divine Child and On the Nature of the Psyche, I realized that for the first time, I had encountered something like holistic psychology. Jung’s writings were also fruitful for my bioenergy studies and my subsequent attempt of a scientific vocabulary regarding the cosmic energy field, which is ultimately something like a systems approach to human emotions. Krishnamurti, J. (K) Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was born in a small village in south India. Soon after 142
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moving to Madras with his family in 1909, Krishnamurti was adopted by Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society. She was convinced that he was to become a great spiritual teacher, and Reverend Charles Webster Leadbeater became his personal tutor. Three years later she took him to England to be educated in preparation for his future role. An organization called The Order of the Star was set up to promote Krishnamurti’s anticipated role as a World Teacher and Maitreya. In 1929, however, after many years of questioning the destiny imposed upon him, Krishnamurti disbanded this organization, turning away all followers saying that: ‘Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular spiritual path.’ From that time until his death in February 1986 at the age of ninety, he traveled around the world speaking as a private person, teaching and giving talks and having discussions. His aim was to set people psychologically free so that they might be in harmony with themselves, with nature and with others. K taught that humanity has cre-
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ated the environment in which we live and that nothing can ever put a stop to the violence and suffering that has been going on for thousands of years except a transformation in the human psyche. If only a dozen people are transformed, it would change the world. He used to call this transformation ‘psychological revolution.’ Krishnamurti maintained that there is no path to this transformation, no method for achieving it, no gurus or spiritual authorities who can help. He pointed to the need for an ever-deepening and acute awareness in which the limitations of the mind could drop away. K was a universal and cosmopolitan mind. Although born of Indian parentage, he stated repeatedly that he had no nationality and belonged to no particular culture of group. What he hoped his audience would learn, he himself was the living example for it, which is, in my view, the only way a guru can legitimize himself as a true leader. Only what is brought over as incarnated can be shared, not what is merely preached or lectured as true as it may be. Education has always been one of Krishnamurti’s concerns. If a young person could learn to see his or her conditioning of race, nationality, religion, dogma, tradition, opin144
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ion etc., which inevitably leads to conflict, then they might become fully intelligent human beings for whom right action would be a natural way of life. K reasoned that a prejudiced or dogmatic mind can never be free. During his life time K established several schools in different parts of the world where young people and adults could come together and explore this possibility further in actual daily living. Krishnamurti said of the schools that they were places where students and teachers can flower inwardly. Because, schools are meant for that, not just merely to turn out human beings as mechanical, technological instruments—though jobs and careers are necessary—but also to flower as human beings, without fear, without confusion, with great integrity. He was concerned to bring about a good human being, not in the respectable sense, but in the sense of whole, unfragmented. He wanted the schools to be real centers of understanding, of real comprehension of life. Lao-tzu Lao-tzu (604 BC–531 BC) was a Chinese classical philosopher. The reputed founder
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of Taoism, he preached conformity to the Tao, or eternal spirit of right conduct, and is considered one of the great figures of Chinese history. He is the author of the Tao Te Ching. According to the legend Lao-tzu was a contemporary of Confucius, and worked as an archivist in the Imperial Library of the Zhou Dynasty (1122–256 BC). Hearing of Lao-tzu’s wisdom, Confucius traveled to meet him. Confucius put much emphasis on traditional rituals, customs and rites. Confucius met him in Zhou, where he was going to browse the library scrolls. Lao-tzu strongly opposed what he felt to be hollow practices. Taoist legend claims that these discussions proved more educational for Confucius than did the contents of the libraries. Lao-tzu perceived that the kingdom’s affairs were disintegrating, so it was time to leave. He was traveling West on a buffalo when he came to the Han Gu Pass, which was guarded. The keeper of the pass realized Lao-tzu was leaving permanently, so he requested that Lao-tzu write out some of his wisdom so that it could be preserved once he was gone, Lao-tzu climbed down from his buffalo and immediately wrote the Tao Te Ching. He then left and was never heard of again.
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Murphy, Joseph Dr. Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) wrote, taught, counseled, and lectured to thousands all over the world for nearly fifty years. Born in 1898, he was educated in Ireland and England. Dr. Murphy was MinisterDirector of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles for 28 years, where his lectures were attended by 1300 to 1500 people every Sunday. His daily radio program during all that time was immensely popular. He moved to Laguna Hills, California in 1976, where he continued to speak every Sunday until he made his transition in 1981. Murphy refused requests for profiles and biographies, saying that his life was to be found in his books. He wrote more than thirty books, including The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power (1973), Secrets of the I-Ching (1970), The Miracle of Mind Dynamics (1964), Think Yourself Rich (2001). Dr. Joseph Murphy’s books have transformed my life. I admit it was not a miracle one-day cure. It took me a few years, but these years of working with Murphy’s method, and adapting it to my own needs, really was worth millions of dollars as it transformed my life from a victim-like and anxiety-ridden existence into an endless
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string of joy, excitement, creativity and ultimately—happiness! I have lectured about the Murphy method in several of my books and videos, and came to call it ‘Creative Prayer.’ However, I do believe that no God concept is necessary to benefit from this prayer technique which Murphy called ‘scientific prayer.’ While faith is well needed to reap the benefits, faith is not something necessarily linked to religion. One can be faithful in one’s destiny, in one’s proven success principles, in one’s positive attitude, one can be faithful in one’s genius, in one’s self-confidence or problem-solving capability. Picasso, Pablo Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. It has been estimated that Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics. —Brigitte Leal, et al., The Ultimate Picasso (2000), Hans L.C. Jaffe, Picasso (1996), Brassai,
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Conversations with Picasso (1999), HenriGeorges Clouzot, The Mystery of Picasso (DVD, 2003), Edward Quinn, Picasso: The Man and His Work, Part 1 (1881-1937) and Part 2 (1938-1973), New York: Art Series (DVD).
Since high school times, Picasso was for me the incarnation of the artist-genius, a true archetype. There was no other visual artist who ever could trigger so many emotions in me, and so much admiration, while I also like Marc Chagall, Juan Miró, Salvador Dali and many others. But on a simple human level, Picasso was and is closest to my heart and soul. Picasso is known to have not shunned tradition, but to have surpassed it, as he was able already at age 14 to paint like the old masters, which led his father, a reputed Spanish painter, to put the paintbrush in his hands in that early age. Picasso also was a man of courage, a true hero in the good sense, a lover of nature, of all that is authentic, honest, great and original. As such, he was unwavering even when, in the 1930s, he was threatened through Hitler’s getting to power in Germany, and his friends urged him to leave France and emigrate to the United States, but Picasso 149
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heroically resisted. He stayed despite the danger, and nothing happened to him. And Picasso knew why he did not want to settle in the USA. If there was one country that truly shunned Picasso, it was Uncle Sam’s hero paradise. As Picasso was for a while a member of the Communist Party, he was not allowed a visa for entering the United States of America. Picasso also was a wonderful father; his daughter Paloma Picasso became a film star. She was the child of Picasso and Françoise Gilot, a French painter. She grew up wild, first in the relation Picasso-Gilot when her father was living in the manor La Galoise, and then with Picasso and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, in the villa La Californie in Cannes, France. The photograph of adolescent Paloma was taken by the American photographer David Douglas Duncan and published in the photo book The Private World of Pablo Picasso. —Donald Douglas Duncan, The Private World of Pablo Picasso, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. —There is an enormous amount of literature and media about Picasso. See, for example, Brassai, Conversations with Picasso (1999), Hans
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L.C. Jaffe, Picasso (1996), The Ultimate Picasso (2000), Henri-Georges Clouzot, The Mystery of Picasso, DVD (1956), Edward Quinn, Picasso: The Man and His Work, DVD, 2002.
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The Masks of God ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY NEW YORK: PENGUIN ARKANA, 1992 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1962
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Freud, Sigmund The Interpretation of Dreams NEW YORK: AVON, REISSUE EDITION, 1980
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LSD: Doorway to the Numinous THE GROUNDBREAKING PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH INTO REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS ROCHESTER: PARK STREET PRESS, 2009
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McKenna, Terence The Archaic Revival SAN FRANCISCO: HARPER & ROW, 1992
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Think Yourself Rich USE THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND TO FIND TRUE WEALTH PARAMUS, NJ: REWARD BOOKS, 2001
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