Category: New Age

By Steve Taylor (An Excerpt from “Extraordinary Awakenings”)

A significant lesson we can learn from the shifters who have experienced transformation through turmoil is to live in a mode of detachment. By this I don’t mean a state of emotional detachment, in which we are indifferent to other people or world affairs. I mean a state in which we don’t derive our identity and well-being from external things or mental concepts; I mean a state of being inwardly content and self-sufficient without attachment to possessions, achievements, roles, status, and ambitions.

In psychological terms the dissolution of attachments is the most important aspect of the shifters’ transformations. Since attachments are the building blocks of the ego, the dissolution of attachments leads to the dissolution of the ego itself, which allows a latent higher self to be born.

In this section I will show you how to practice a conscious form of detachment.

Becoming Aware of Your Attachments
First, we need to become aware of our attachments. Sometimes we have carried attachments for so long, and they have attached themselves to us so subtly, that we may not even be conscious of them.

There are so many different types of attachments that it’s difficult to describe them all. In their most obvious and “heaviest” form, attachments occur in the form of addiction — physical addiction to substances like drugs, cigarettes, food, or chocolate, and psychological addiction to electronic devices or to social media. Slightly less overtly, we may be attached to material objects, such as money and possessions. We may also be attached to our own bodies as material objects, caring excessively about our appearance or feeling depressed about the process of aging.

Less overtly still but perhaps most significant of all are our conceptual attachments. For example, we might be attached to our conceptual identity as a member of a national or ethnic group or to our identity and role as a spouse, parent, sibling, and so on. We might be attached to a concept of our status or achievements, feeling that we are “important” and successful people, superior to others. We may be attached in a similar way to our beliefs, our hopes, and our ambitions.

All these attachments build our sense of identity and hold together our ego as a structure. As already suggested, you can picture them as the building blocks of the ego.

In my workshops I often give people a list of different types of attachments and ask them to consider how attached they are to each one. Awareness is liberating in itself. To an extent, simply being aware of your attachments helps you to become free of them.

At the same time, we can take steps to free ourselves from attachments, which I will guide you through now.

Detaching through Spiritual Practice
One of the best ways to help free ourselves from attachments is simply to practice meditation or to follow a spiritual path of some form. Fundamentally, we need attachments because of our separate and fragile ego. Our attachments bolster and reinforce the ego so that it no long feels so vulnerable. So the most fundamental way of releasing ourselves from attachments is to heal the ego itself. This means cultivating a state of inner well-being and wholeness, which removes the need to seek identity and well-being outside ourselves. Without a sense of ego-separation, we won’t feel a sense of lack and fragility, so we will be able to let go of our attachments.

This is the main aim of meditation: to soften the ego as a structure so that its boundaries become weaker and we transcend our normal sense of separation. Meditation helps us to feel connected rather than separate, as if we were participating rather than just observing, without a sense of lack or fragility. It’s as if a broken fragment has become part of the whole again.

This is both a long- and short-term effect of meditation. If you had a good meditation this morning, you probably experienced the sense of connection and inner wholeness I’ve just described. Perhaps it lingered for an hour or two afterward, or perhaps longer — perhaps it’s still inside you now. However, it usually fades away once we have returned to our busy everyday lives and needs to be rekindled by another meditation practice later, or the following day.

At the same time, over the years or decades that you have practiced meditation, an ongoing sense of wholeness has been building up inside you. Even though you may still experience a more intense sense of wholeness when you meditate, the baseline of your normal state has changed. Over the years, your ego boundaries have become softer; your sense of self has become less fragile and separate. As a result — even though you may not be consciously aware of it, since the change has been gradual — your need for psychological attachments has diminished, and you have become less attached to external sources of identity and well-being.

Every spiritual path is a movement beyond ego-separateness and toward connection and union. This is part of the reason why most spiritual traditions emphasize cultivating compassion and practicing acts of service and kindness. By serving others, we transcend our own self-centered desires and ambitions and so move beyond ego-separateness. In this sense, practicing service and altruism can also indirectly help to dissolve our psychological attachments.

Most spiritual traditions also advocate detachment more explicitly. They emphasize a life of simplicity and moderation, without attachment to sensory pleasures or unnecessary possessions. They encourage us to be content with our present life situation rather than being attached to ambitions. They encourage us to be humble rather than to be attached to notions of status and achievement.

Any path or practice that helps you to cultivate inner well-being and wholeness will reduce your need for psychological attachments. You won’t need attachments anymore in the same way that a completed building doesn’t need scaffolding or support.

Breaking Attachments
There are also more direct ways we can use to liberate ourselves from psychological attachments. While following spiritual practices, we can simply make a conscious effort to weaken our attachments. This might sound challenging, but it’s important to remember that, although our psychological attachments may have originated in response to psychological need, in some cases (particularly if you have already begun to meditate or to follow a spiritual practice) they continue as habits. In other words, the attachments may remain intact even if we no longer have a psychological need for them, simply as habit patterns. This makes it fairly easy for us to free ourselves from them.

And even if this is not the case — that is, even if there is still some degree of psychological need — you might be surprised at how quickly you can adjust to the absence of the attachment. After an initial sense of loss and insecurity, you’ll quickly grow stronger. Your essential self will grow into the space left by the attachment, bringing a greater sense of wholeness.

I experienced this many years ago when I gave up smoking. After smoking heavily (twenty-five to thirty roll-up cigarettes a day) for twelve years, I decided to stop on my thirtieth birthday. I had heard many stories about the difficulties of giving up smoking, but for me — once I’d covered the physical withdrawal symptoms by chewing nicotine gum — it wasn’t such an ordeal. After about three weeks of conscious effort (which in itself was not particularly arduous), I was surprised to find that the urge to smoke quickly died away. But what I found even more surprising was the feeling of new strength and wholeness that filled me. It was as if the part of myself that I had sacrificed to my addiction had been given back to me in a natural process of adjustment and healing. I’m sure that this was because, over the previous year or so, I had undergone significant psychological healing. I had started meditating regularly and become a vegetarian. I had also met my future wife. As a result, I probably no longer had a strong psychological need to smoke. My sense of self was more connected and whole, and so I didn’t need the support of cigarettes anymore. To a large extent, I only had the habit to deal with rather than the psychological need. If there was still some psychological need, it evaporated in the process of giving up the attachment.

I would recommend making a similar attempt to weaken your attachments. For example, you might try to weaken your attachment to money and possessions by refraining from buying unnecessary things and following a simpler, more frugal lifestyle. You might try to weaken your attachment to your appearance by no longer wearing fashionable clothes or dyeing your hair. You may try to weaken your attachment to status and attention by making a conscious effort to stop obsessively posting on social media and incessantly trying to increase your number of followers.

This might feel uncomfortable at first but — particularly if you’re already following a spiritual practice — you’ll quickly begin to feel a new sense of inner strength and wholeness. Even if there is still some degree of psychological need for the attachment, a process of inner healing will take place, and your essential self will grow into the space left by the attachment, filling you with a sense of new strength and wholeness.

About Steve Taylor, PhD:
Steve Taylor, PhD, is the author of “Extraordinary Awakenings” and many other bestselling books. He’s senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. Steve’s articles and essays have been published in over 100 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers and he blogs for Scientific American and Psychology Today. Visit him online at www.StevenMTaylor.com.

Adapted from the book from “Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation”. Copyright ©2021 by Steve Taylor. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.

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By Dr. Ervin Laszlo & Fred Tsao (An excerpt from “Dawn of an Era of Well-Being: New Paths to a Better World”)

Humankind today is facing monumental challenges—the sustainability of natural resources, climate change, wealth inequalities, breakdowns in social structures, the impact of artificial intelligence, and of course the threat of pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of how the universe is constantly rebalancing itself to offset forces moving in contradiction to its natural energy, which in Chinese culture is called the Dao. An impact of the virus has been to slow us down and force us all to reflect, to open our eyes to the need for change, to see that a new normal is both required and also imminent. And the crisis also showed that we can heal if we choose a new way.

It is clear that we are at a crossroads. We have a choice—either to continue down the road beset by many crises caused by divisiveness and separation or find the road toward unity, well-being, and thriving. Change is needed on all levels: change for the individual, change for society, and change in the consciousness that defines what we do and who we are. It is imperative that we achieve constructive change on all levels if we are to avoid even greater crises heading our way with the direst of consequences.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by a sense of chaos, but amidst the chaos lies the possibility of connecting with each other, reconnecting to our roots, and creating a shift in our consciousness. Now we can set about creating a new and better era for the human family, an era marked by individual and collective well-being.

This task and possibility inspires and motivates the ideas put forward in this book. It is the hope and expectation of the authors that they will prove to be of practical value as the human community sets about the monumental task of building a better world, rising from the global health crisis as a phoenix rises from the ashes of the past.

The universe is more like a great thought than like a great machine. This realization, enunciated by cosmologist James Jeans over a hundred years ago, is dawning on many scientists today. It brings cosmology close to religion and spirituality and opens the way to reconsidering the idea of a divine element in nature in terms acceptable to science.

Coherence in society calls for working together and creating the system where “I” becomes “WE”—where the parts maintain their unique identity while working together to maintain the integral coherence of the whole that they form. This is the principle we obtain from the quantum paradigm. Public policy is the field for the application of this principle. It defines the coexistence of unique but not separate individuals in coherent wholes, whether these wholes are states and nations, or businesses or social and cultural groups.

We live in an integral quantum universe and not in a mechanistic world where whole and parts are separate, or even separable. In the intrinsically whole quantum universe, the whole is the existential context for the existence of the parts. Not only in abstract theory, but also in concrete practice, the whole and the part need to be treated as one, and for the good of the part, the whole needs to receive priority attention.

There is nothing more important in any group and in any society than having an informed and responsible leader. The quantum leader—the leader acting on the wholeness principle deriving from the quantum paradigm—is one who focuses on aligning, collaborating, and creating conditions conducive to the flourishing of life.

The leader effectively serving the good of society serves the interest of all life on the planet. This requirement may appear idealistic and even utopian in the context of today’s dominant ideology in business and politics. But the post-pandemic era requires radical changes in our idea and ideals of leadership. The quantum paradigm offers the necessary fundamental reorientation.

The universe is constantly calibrating with itself and its systems, reflecting collaboration in diversity. This is a dynamic process of alignment with its elements to arrive at harmonic balance. We need to awaken to the deep truth of this arrangement, and we can do so because we are creative. At its core, humanity cannot go against nature. There is a need to awaken to the fact that all things in the natural world are continually aligning and realigning with each other, collaborating in natural movement as the elements work toward their flourishing.

The goal is to achieve harmony and unity amidst diversity to make human society a reflection of the reality of nature. By integrating the Western life science of consciousness with traditional Chinese wisdom a foundational structure for universal ethics will guide humankind’s journey toward Great Unity, a society in which diversity is not only respected but deployed in the process of creation and collaboration. It is only in diversity that great things are made. The same things brought together create more of the same things, but diversity creates something extraordinary.

About Ervin László:
Ervin László is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist (and originally a concert pianist) who has published about 75 books and over 400 papers. An advocate of the theory of quantum consciousness, Laszlo has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and is the recipient of four honorary PhDs (from the United States, Canada, Finland, and Hungary). His many awards and distinctions include the Peace Prize of Japan, the Goi Award (Tokyo 2002), the International Mandir of Peace Prize (Assisi 2005), and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize (2004 and 2005). Formerly Professor of Philosophy, Systems Science, and Futures Studies in various universities in the US, Europe, and the Far East, Laszlo lectures worldwide. Today he lives in a four hundred year-old former chapel in the hills of Tuscany.

“Dawn of an Era of Well-Being” by Ervin Laszlo and Fred Tsao is available on Amazon. For more information, visit www.ervinlaszlobooks.com or follow @thelaszloinstitute on Facebook. You can also download a free copy of Dr. Laszlo’s other book “The Portable Laszlo” HERE.

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