{"id":22525,"date":"2025-01-21T14:26:29","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T13:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kennethsorensen.dk\/?p=22525"},"modified":"2026-05-06T20:10:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T19:10:49","slug":"inner-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethsorensen.dk\/en\/inner-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Inner Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The mountaineer of the soul climbs by his own muscles, but with maps from those who went before. Assagioli’s introduction to the inner world and the psychospiritual work that meets the chaos found there with discipline and grace<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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By Roberto Assagioli, MD<\/strong> [i]<\/a>
Assagioli Archives, Florence, Doc. #1279
Original title: Vita Interna<\/em>
Transcribed from an original written document by Istituto di Psicosintesi
Translated and edited with notes by Jan Kuniholm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editorial Note<\/strong>
The abstract and contextual subtitle in this online edition have been added by the editor, Kenneth Sorensen, to support readability, navigation, and archival consistency. As Jan Kuniholm notes in his translator’s commentary, this lecture appears to be the introductory comments for a planned series of talks or course on inner life. The original wording has not been altered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Abstract<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In this introductory lecture, Roberto Assagioli invites the reader to turn inward at a moment when triumphant materialism has reached the limits of what it can offer. We have mastered the external energies of nature, he observes, while remaining strangers and often slaves to the forces within. The first steps of self-exploration are not flattering: instead of peace, the seeker finds chaos and conflict, and the early attempts at meditation only reveal how disobedient the mind can be. But this discovery should neither terrify nor discourage. Beneath the noise lie latent energies and riches that can be disciplined and transformed. Drawing on the image of the mountaineer of the soul who climbs by his own muscles but follows maps drawn by those who went before, Assagioli sketches the territory of inner work the planned course will cover, from the study of self to the yoga of daily life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I do not think that many words need to be spent to show the desirability of a guide devoted to Inner Life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our civilization, which is entirely mechanical and materialistic and focused on the conquest of earthly goods and powers, has absorbed the attention, interest and energies of people and diverted them to external activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus it has come to pass that modern man, who has increased his knowledge of the external world so much, probing the mysteries of the infinitely small and the infinitely large with wonderful instruments, finds himself perplexed and lost before the enigma of his own being. He, who has shrewdly enslaved and exploited powerful energies of nature for his own needs or pleasures, is rather a helpless laughingstock and a slave to the dark passionate forces that stir and burst into his own soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This painful and humiliating contrast between external and internal knowledge and powers had remained unnoticed during the period of triumphant materialism. The intoxication of discoveries and achievements in the world of nature had mostly hidden modern man\u2019s spiritual misery from himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is no longer the case. Materialism has everywhere gone bankrupt in the theoretical and practical fields, and in social life as in individual life its failure is complete. In science the physicists, by resolving the atom into a system of minute electrical charges \u2014 and metapsychic researchers, by achieving the dematerialization of organic substance \u2014 have stripped materialism of its basis and its very raison d’\u00eatre<\/em>, namely, the supposed \u201csubstantiality\u201d and permanence of matter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n