The text discusses the challenges and methods involved in achieving spiritual consciousness. It identifies fear and attachments as significant obstacles comparing fear to paralysis and attachments to heavy weights that hinder progress.
By Dr. Roberto Assagioli, (Doc. #23760 – Assagioli Archives – Florence). Original Title: La Psicosintesi Spirituale, Meeting III – March 19, 1938, 1. Gli Ostacoli Emotivi — 2. Gli Attaccamenti. Translated and Edited with Notes by Jan Kuniholm[I]
Abstract: The text discusses the challenges and methods involved in achieving spiritual consciousness. It identifies fear and attachments as significant obstacles, comparing fear to paralysis and attachments to heavy weights that hinder progress. Attachments are divided into active (instincts, desires, affections) and passive (inertia, habits), both of which bind individuals and prevent spiritual ascent. The author asserts that all attachments, whether deemed good or bad, are based on false perceptions and hinder spiritual growth. Detachment can be achieved through several methods: Tearing Away: Life sometimes forces detachment through loss, which, although painful, can lead to personal growth; Transmutation: Transforming attachments by redirecting emotional energies towards higher goals. This is gradual and varies in difficulty among individuals; Downplaying and Humor: Adopting a lighter, more detached perspective on life, viewing it as a performance where one plays their part without overly serious emotional investment; and Inner Independence: Developing self-reliance and spiritual autonomy by trusting in one’s inner spiritual resources and connection with the divine. The ultimate goal is to achieve true freedom, allowing one to love more deeply and constructively without being enslaved by attachments.
In our examination of the difficulties and obstacles that make man’s ascent to the heights of spiritual consciousness difficult and painful, we have mentioned fear, which may be compared to a paralysis that stops the wayfarer’s steps, taking away his strength and spirit to proceed.
Today we are going to talk about the multiple attachments to people, to things, to ways of life, which can be compared to heavy lead balls tied to the feet of the man who would like to proceed, that are like laces that trip his steps and sometimes even cause him to go back.
The man who “lets himself live,” who lets himself be carried along by the current [of life], who does not pause to study himself, does not realize how bound and enslaved he is, at least until serious events arise. But whoever tries to leave his usual abodes, the beaten paths of the plain, and begins to climb, soon realizes how numerous and tenacious are the attachments that hold him captive.
The attachments are of two kinds:
- Active attachments: instincts, passions, desires, and affections that bind one to people and possessions; that absorb energy and demand time, intention, care; that distract in various ways from the high goal to which one aspires.
- Passive attachments. These are less conspicuous, but no less real and hindering. They are inertia, physical and moral laziness, the “heaviness” that nails one down; all the forces of “routine,” of traditionalism, of habits, of the “tracks” which one avoids leaving.
From the spiritual point of view, from the point of view of true values, all passionate and exclusive attachment, all moral inertia, are based on false appreciation, on a mistaken view. They denote an absence of perspective, a partial and distorted conception of reality, a violation of the law of harmony and the great hierarchical principle, whereby God, Reality, the Good, which is the supreme Value, should have first place in our minds and hearts and should be the highest goal of our will.
From another point of view, it can be said that every attachment is an error, an opposition to the law of Life, since it attempts the vain and desperate feat of stopping, fixing, stiffening one part of Life, detached from the rest; whereas Life is one, unified, and is an immense current in a continuous flow, a dynamic manifestation in continuous transformation. In this light, it happens that what at a given moment was a help, a stimulus, a favorable condition for expansion, can later become an obstacle, a bond, a restraint.
This for example constitutes the drama of maternal love when the mother does not have the wisdom to transform the quality and manifestations of her love, gradually adjusting them to the development of her children’s personalities.
An important fact emerges from this, namely that attachments are obstacles to spiritual realization, not only when they are of the low and so-called “bad” type, but also when they are the so-called “good” ones. These indeed are often the most insidious and tenacious, precisely because they are apparently justified.
Seeing this clearly, freeing oneself from illusions and blindness, is of great help: it is the necessary first step. By itself, however, it is not sufficient. It marks only the beginning of the struggle and travail for inner liberation.
Even when one has seen clearly and wants to free oneself, attachments stubbornly resist in us. This was very well expressed by Rabindranath Tagore in one of the Gitanjali poems:
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted. [ii]
METHODS FOR IMPLEMENTING DETACHMENT
- The method of “tearing away.” Life often imposes this method by taking away, in various ways, the people and things to which we are attached. It is the most radical and the quickest, but it is most painful, and can provoke serious reactions. However — after a period of emotional storm (during which very little help can be given) — the person usually emerges matured and strengthened.
- The method of transmutation. This method transforms our attachments by means of the sublimation of the emotional energies that determine them, and by the enlargement and replacement of the “objects” toward which they are directed. This method is the most gradual and harmonious, and eventually leads to the same result.
It succeeds more or less easily according to individual constitutions, which are, in this respect, quite different. In some people the emotional energies are flexible and easily “displaceable,”sometimes even too diffuse. In others, however, they are, to use a material metaphor, “dense,” “sticky,” “tenacious,” and therefore they can be moved and transformed only with great effort. [iii]
We see how this method can be applied to what is the typical and central attachment: what we call love. Very different things are designated by the word “love,” such as sexual, instinctive love; the various species of passionate and sentimental love; mystical and spiritual love. I must limit myself on this occasion to a few observations. [iv]
The most important and most often occurring sublimation is that of passionate and emotional love into spiritual love. Let us see clearly what the differences between them are. Passionate love is possessive, demanding, hoarding, exclusive, and jealous. Spiritual love is generous and radiating. Those who love spiritually remain free and give freedom.
Characteristics of Spiritual Love
(a) Loving God, the Supreme, above all other things and creatures. Since God is the Supreme Good, He deserves and rightly requires to be put first. This is the true meaning of the symbolic expression (which has lent itself to misinterpretation), “God is jealous.”
Even love toward God can also have various degrees of elevation and purity. Thus we first love God for the inner sweetness He gives us, for the graces He bestows on us, for the benefits we expect from Him. Then, through successive and painful purifications, we come to love Him in an increasingly unselfish, lofty and generous way. These stages of the love relationship with God have been set forth admirably, even with fine psychological analysis, by St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross in their celebrated works, and are succinctly stated in another beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore:
My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked ⎯ this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind ⎯ saving me from perils of overmuch desire.
There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire. [v]
(b) Loving everything and everyone in God; that is, loving them with reference to God, as a manifestation of God, as souls proceeding on like us on the way back to God.
(c) Spiritual love differentiated according to its objects. Spiritual love is not something cold, abstract and “undifferentiated.”[vi] Instead, it is alive, warm, and takes on different specific qualities according to the different nature of the beings toward whom it is directed, and according to the relationships of affection and feeling we have with them. All these different qualities of spiritual love have been very well studied and described by Father Sertillanges in his excellent book L’Amour Chrétien. [vii]
The expansion of the sphere of our emotional relationships (resulting in less narrow and exclusive attachment to a single relationship or object) is greatly facilitated by the new characteristics of modern life. The broadening and intensification of human relationships produced by the easier and faster means of communication and the new forms of social life favor the various forms of companionship, of cooperation, which appropriately correct tendencies toward exclusivism and excessive attachment.
The same can be said for the substitution of objects on which to pour the fullness of our affective energies, the treasures of feeling that constitute the painful embarras de richesses [viii] of many souls, especially for women. The varied, vast and growing volume of social activities provides numerous opportunities for the beneficial expression of feelings when life has not allowed direct and personal fulfillment of them.
Then there is the substitution of human objects with spiritual objects, which was indicated by R.W. Emerson with a short and effective sentence: “When the demigods leave, the gods come.”[ix]
3. The method of “downplaying” and humor. Many people are excessively “attached” because they are wont to take life, situations, and people too seriously; they tend to “take everything tragically.”
To free themselves they should cultivate a “looser,” more serene, more impersonal attitude. It is a matter of learning to observe the human comedy “from above,” without participating in it too emotionally; to regard the life of the world as a “performance” in which everyone plays his or her part. This is to be played to the best of one’s ability, but without completely identifying with the “character” one is impersonating.
One of the most profound and ingenious Indian conceptions is that of the “cosmic dance” of Shiva (which is one of the aspects of the Supreme). It has been stated briefly as follows:
The essential meaning of the Dance of Shiva is threefold. Firstly, it is the image of His Rhythmic Play as the source of all Movement in the Cosmos; secondly, the Object of this Dance is the Deliverance of countless human souls from the Trap of Illusion; thirdly, the place of Dance, Chidambaram, the Center of the Universe, is in our heart.[x]
The same conception is expounded in a very beautiful and evocative way by Hermann Keyserling in the chapter, entitled “Divine Comedy,” of his South American Meditations.
Observing and living life in this broad and elevated way, one sees that it has serious, hard, painful sides, but it also has happy, mild, bright, comic and funny aspects. These constitute proper and necessary balances and counterbalances. “The art of living” consists in appropriately alternating the different elements and attitudes, and doing this is in our power far more than we think.
A valuable weapon for this purpose is humor, which in its best and truest aspects (quite different from superficial or vulgar “comedy”) is imbued with feeling. It can be said to combine understanding, sympathy and compassion, with detachment.
4. The method of inner independence and spiritual autonomy. Many attachments are due to a sense of dependence on others, a need — or a presumed need — for support and help. Many people believe and fear that they cannot stand up for themselves, that they will lose themselves if they do not lean on or cling to others.
To free ourselves from such attachments, which are limitations and bondages, we must trust the powerful energies that are latent in the human soul, in each of us. We must reaffirm our true spiritual nature; appeal to our true being, our deep soul, our higher, spiritual “I” or Self. In communion with God, with the supreme Spiritual Reality, we can find all the light, strength, help we need.
In conclusion, let us realize well that getting rid of attachments does not mean doing negative work; it does not imply any mutilation, any loss. As an Eastern sage said, “As you learn to be detached, you will discover that you can love those dear to you in a deeper and more constructive way.”
To be detached is to have won the highest of all freedoms, indeed the only true freedom: “The freedom of God’s children.”
[i] Editor’s interpolations are shown in [brackets]. —Ed.
[ii] Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Poem #28. Prose translation by Tagore, New York, Macmillan Co. 1920.
[iii] A more extensive exposition of this theme is found in the Lecture “Transformation and Sublimation of Psychic Energies” from the Course on Psychosynthesis given in the year 1933. —Author’s Note.
[iv] Other thoughts are contained in my writings on “Spiritual Love” and “Transformation and Sublimation of Love.”—Author’s Note.
[v] Tagore, op.cit. poem #14.
[vi] The editor at www.psicoenergetica.com has corrected this from the typed manuscript, which reads “differentiated.” —Ed.
[vii] Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges (1863-1948) was a French Dominican priest and philosopher. His book L’Amour Chrétien [Christian Love] was published in 1921. This book is available in French editions only and is available on the used book market. —Ed.
[viii] French: “an embarrassment of riches.” —Ed.
[ix] Source unknown. —Ed.
[x] The author quoted this passage in French. Its origin was not cited.—Ed.
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