Synchronicity: When Everything Really Does Happen for a Reason

"All things work together for the good of those who love the Lord" - St. Paul

Sometimes everything really does happen for a reason.

Last year I wrote a post debunking the commonly-heard remark that "everything happens for a reason". I called it the EHFAR attitude. It's much favoured by New Age acolytes, because it sounds profound and casts a rosy - and often misleading - glow over all kinds of mistakes and problems. If we can't recognize when we've made a mistake, we can't change. So the EHFAR philosophy, applied too broadly, kills spiritual progress.

For instance, one New Age-y alcoholic of my acquaintance once took a wrong turn and ended up in Miami, Florida, hundreds of miles from his destination. The fact that he was drunk at the time didn't stop him from claiming that it had "happened for a reason". The reason, he said, was that he had been given an unexpected stay in Miami, which he'd always wanted to visit. But, I pointed out, spending 48 hours semi-comatose in a motel was hardly "visiting Miami". Still, he so much wanted to justify his drunken spree that he clung tenaciously to the idea that all had happened for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

As an example of self-justifying, this was a typical response by someone who wasn't ready to see their own mistakes.

Years later, when at last he came into recovery, he saw that spree - what he could remember of it - as yet another one of the really stupid things he'd done while drunk. Which, of course, it was. And he made amends to his family for the harm and distress he had caused them, which he had never realized before.

Many, perhaps most, people live under the Law of Accident. Nothing then happens for any kind of sublime, spiritual reason. Things just happen. They go the only way they can go, and the result is entropy, sometimes chaos. We can all slip to that level if we give up trying to become more conscious.

But, if we are living at a higher level than that of life, everything really does begin to happen for a reason.

I'm assuming that you, dear reader, are living at this higher level, or at least that you would like to, that you are making real efforts.

In this case, everything may well be happening for a reason in your life, and you can very often see that reason quite easily.

Not only those of us in the Work may experience this higher level. A Good Householder, someone who follows the path of duty and lives according to his or her conscience, will also often find that events have worked out well in unexpected ways, and that benevolent "coincidences", which Jung called synchronicity, occur far more often than chance.

Those following a religious path, whether in the world or in monasteries, also frequently live at this higher level. They understand what Sufis call "the Cause behind the cause", and see how seemingly unconnected events may actually be joined at that higher level and lead to spiritual progress.

Accidents happen all the time at the level of life. There is nothing but mechanicalness in many people's lives, because they don't even know that a higher level, a higher purpose than just eating, sleeping and reproducing, exists and that they could reach it by making efforts. We see this most clearly in the lives of active alcoholics and addicts, whose series of accidents will most likely end in death and on the way destroy the happiness of those around them.

But we may choose to live more consciously, and then God - Conscious Humanity, Jesus, the saints - can reach into our lives and bring about miraculous happenings. This is what St Paul meant by his cryptic statement at the start of this post.

Let me give two examples from my own experience.

After a Work week in New York I was returning with a group of friends, driving back to Georgia. We lost our way in the maze of highways around Washington, DC (this was long before the days of satnavs). But, as we were there, I felt very strongly that we should visit a Sufi sheikh of my acquaintance, who taught at a well-known university in Washington.

This sheikh was surprised to see us, but accepted our visit in the spirit of Sufi hospitality. We were all full of the higher energies generated by a week of intensive work, and he could see this. He was free that afternoon because a tutorial had just "happened" to get cancelled. And, by synchonicity, a friend of this sheikh, a well-known Middle Eastern sheikh of another Sufi Order, also "happened" to be visiting him at the same time.

That sheikh, whom we met that day for the first and last time, was in Washington only for a very short stay, and that night he had been invited to hold a special tekke, or service, in an apartment near the university.

We too were invited to join the circle, and that night we experienced what I can only describe as another world; the chanting and prayers led all of us into an even higher state than we had reached in New York, and it was a life-changing experience for all of us. All kinds of mysterious but clearly fated events began to happen to us after that, and all of us felt that our time in the Sufi circle, so different from anything we'd experienced before, acted as a catalyst for an amazing series of "happenings" that changed us all for ever in the months that followed.

This was real synchronicity. Our "getting lost" had happened for a reason, and the reason was that we could come closer to the Law of Fate, and experience, even though temporarily, what it would be like to live at a much more conscious level. Because I was in a higher state of consciousness my intuition functioned perfectly, and I knew we had to visit the university where the Sufi Sheikh taught.

On the journey back to Georgia, we experienced many more synchonicities. They came thick and fast, and we reached our homes much earlier than we'd believed possible.

But there was one small synchronicity that amused us very much.

One member of our party was married, and he said, in mock gloom, "I'll really be in the doghouse when I get back. We've taken two days longer than we were supposed to, and my wife's going to be furious."

And then, just a few seconds later, we passed a dog-grooming parlour outside which was a huge sign proclaiming "Kim's Doghouse".

And our friend's wife's name was Kim!

We all thought that was a significant sign from Conscious Humanity that we were indeed on the right path.  God has a sense of humour, after all. And in that little synchronistic event He'd shown us that He was with us, even in the very small things, and that confirmed the rightness of what we'd done.

My friend was indeed in the "doghouse" when he got back, but that too turned out well, and he made some beneficial changes in his life as a result. He become a much better husband and father, living more responsibly from then on.

I suspect that you, my reader, have also experienced many synchronicities in your life. When they happen, we can be sure we are on the right path, living according to the Law of Fate, approaching closer to our destiny.

And sometimes they seem to happen in advance of our living at a higher level. God knows when we are in a more approachable state, when we just might be willing to pay attention to our level of consciousness and rethink the way we've been living.

Such a synchronicity happened in the life of my alcoholic friend. He was arrested for drunk driving, but instead of being sent to the town "drunk tank" he was shown a video of a rehab centre and he chose to apply for a place there. His motive was to avoid a jail term, but the result was that he came into recovery. The arresting officer would have immediately locked him up in the cells, but for the fact that a social worker, visiting another suspect, "happened" to be present when my friend was brought into the police station.

That social worker saw something in my friend, some deeply-buried longing for recovery, and responded - albeit unconsciously - to that longing. She persuaded the deeply suspicious police officer to show him the video she "happened" to have with her.

God had anticipated my friend's recovery, and given him a nudge. And today, that man has been sober for more than 20 years and is very active in AA, visiting alcoholics in their homes and persuading them, often successfully, to try going to AA.

God does indeed work for good in the lives of those who love Him.

Nostalgia - Friend or Foe?

Thinking of Passover again, with the holiday due to start this weekend, I've been reflecting on the different types of Israelites who followed Moses into the wilderness. Of course, they're all I's in us, all commonly found reactions to new experiences, and they can all teach us something useful about ourselves.

Perhaps the most sympathetic, to me at least, are the "murmurers" in the crowd. You know, the complainers and grumblers who kept on and on reminiscing about the wonderful leeks, cucumbers and melons they'd enjoyed back in Egypt, when they were slaves.

The food back there was really great, they told Moses, but now all we have is this weird stuff called "manna". Why ever did we leave Egypt? It was better to be a slave and enjoy good food than to chase after a Promised Land and have to exist on "manna". We should never have left! It's all your fault for bringing us here!

The reason I can relate to these sorry individuals is that - as an alcoholic and as a human being - I too can, if I choose, look back to a mythical past and compare it with present troubles. In that imaginary past, everything was easy and fun, and life was much better. 

If alcoholics think this way in relation to their drinking, it's known as "euphoric recall". The same is true for any addiction. The path to freedom is difficult and involves giving up much that we have enjoyed in the past; even though, with drugs and alcohol, the enjoyment quickly turned to sackcloth and ashes, in our own false memory we were much happier then.

It's a dangerous way to think. Persisted with, it can lead to relapse. And in everyday life, too, even if we're not tempted to drink or use drugs, we can easily live in a place of illusion rather than in the present, with all its problems and challenges.

For freedom is a challenge, an opportunity that many refuse to take up. We're so used to having our brains follow the well-trodden paths, to repeating old patterns and habitual attitudes. They're not happy experiences, but they are familiar. If we want to change, we must abandon these old ways of thinking, which means - in counsellor talk - moving out of our "comfort zones". Physically, new neural pathways must be forged. We must move into the unexplored parts of our minds to experience something new, to be free from the backwards drag of the past.

In the Work, we speak of "metanoia" or thinking in a new way, undergoing a renewal of our mind. This is possible only when we give up the old ways, but that giving up seems threatening, because when we start something new we have no assurance that it will end well, that we really will reach whatever our Promised Land may be. 

Such an attitude was epitomized for me by an elderly lady I once knew. In her late 80s, living in a beautiful, comfortable bungalow with a loving husband, and with her children and grandchildren frequent visitors, she nevertheless managed to feel sorry for herself.

Her complaints would begin with anything that happened to be going on at the moment, whether it was a poor telephone connection, bad weather or a meal that hadn't turned out as expected. And she always ended with "I never should have left the island". 

The "island" was a real place, the location of her mythically happy childhood. In her childhood reminiscences the sun always shone, her mother was always happy, her sister always ready to play on the beach. There was no school, no discipline; life was a perpetual holiday with no work and no compulsion to do anything except enjoy herself.

Of course, it wasn't like that at all! But such is the power of nostalgia that it can make us long for a time that never was in a land that never existed. We give up all chance of enjoying the present and of working on ourselves if we lose our bearings in nostalgia.

Yet, there's a different type of nostalgia that is actually a spiritual experience. It's the longing, the ineffable yearning that all of us sometimes experience when in the presence of great beauty. It may be the natural beauty of the forest or the sea that triggers this nostalgia; it may suddenly descend on us when we're in a Gothic cathedral complete with soaring stone arches, stained glass windows, and a choir singing hymns of surpassing beauty. I've felt it in a beautiful mosque with its gorgeous tiles,  sacred architecture and atmosphere of utter peace. It may surround us when we hear Gabrieli, or Monteverdi, or Palestrina; when we look at a great, objective work of art such as Rembrandt's Prodigal Son, or pages from the Book of Kells; or when we see a beautiful, innocent child playing on a patch of grass, utterly absorbed in her dolls or puzzles.

This is the feeling that the Sufis call "the great nostalgia".

It is given to us to remind us of the fact that we do not belong only in this material world, but that our Essence comes from somewhere far above it, which is our true home.

The beauty we experience on earth - whether in a cathedral or mosque, or in a Zen temple; or whether in unspoiled Nature, or in art - is only a reflection of what our true home is like.

That place, which many people call "heaven", is where we originated. It is the place to which we shall one day return, and for which, unconsciously, we always long. The times when the great nostalgia descends upon us are spiritual experiences because they remind us to look above and beyond the material, and into the realm of the spirit itself. They are a form of self-remembering.

Then, nostalgia is not a looking back to a false past, but a looking forward to a future which is more real than anything we know on Earth.

Praise God for the "great nostalgia" which calls us home!

 

The Month of Nissan - Moving Towards Greater Freedom

The Hebrew month of Nissan, which began last Saturday, marks the beginning of the spiritual New Year in Judaism. As with other great religious festivals, this timing reflects the special cosmic energies which reach the Earth at different times during its annual orbit of the Sun.

The better-known secular Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, takes place in Autumn, but Jewish mystical thought sees Nissan as the time of spiritual renewal and growth towards greater freedom.

The increase of light, the flowering plants and trees, the birth of young animals and birds, and all the joyful signs of Springtime shine forth now as the Earth passes through the Aries-Libra axis. Many ancient cultures celebrated the New Year at this time, just after the Spring Equinox, because the renewal of life is so obvious now.

Conscious men and woman situated religious festivals at the most propitious time of year for their celebration; clearly, it was appropriate that the great drama of Christ's Passion should take place now, so it was timed that both the Passover and Easter were to take place at this very special time of year. Jesus knew that His death and resurrection would have to take place directly preceding the Passover. Both Easter and Passover are about the redemption of mankind from slavery and death, and He came to deepen our understanding of this process and to show us how we may participate in it by our own self-sacrifice and personal resurrection.

Passover marks the passage of the Israelites from their life of slavery in Egypt to the freedom they were to enjoy in their Promised Land, Israel.  When they left Egypt, the Jews had been conditioned to endure life as slaves, rather than to live as free people with the power of choice. They needed time to become free within, as well as without. This time we know as the period of wandering in the wilderness, when the Jews underwent a lengthy purification to make them ready for a life as free men and women, subject to the laws of God rather than slaves to Pharaoh.

Psychologically, today Passover has become a festival of freedom for oppressed people all over the world. It's celebrated in many churches, because it was at the festival of Passover that Jesus chose to suffer death on the cross in order to win a greater liberation for all. He showed us how we must die to all our mechanicalness, all our self-seeking, all our slaveries - our addictions - in order to rise to greater life in God.

In the Work, we see how the festival of Easter brings the completion, the universal fulfillment, of the spiritual possibilities given to the Jews at Passover. No longer limited to a particular people in a particular time and place, Easter makes redemption a possibility for everyone, no matter what his or her life circumstances may be.

To better understand the underlying meaning of Easter, we need to look at Passover. Jesus, as a Jew, celebrated Passover every year with his family. Whenever possible, Jews went to Jerusalem to keep the feast, because that was the location of the Temple where sacrifices were offered. We've seen in previous posts how important in the ancient world was the enactment of the blood sacrifice. Initially, conscious men and women instituted the sacrifice of animals, repugnant as it was, because it was a necessary half-way stage from human sacrifice, as practiced by pagans, to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, whose own blood purified the Earth and brought the chance of redemption to everyone. That is why animal sacrifices were no longer necessary after the crucifixion of Jesus.

Before the Jews could escape from Egypt, they were told by a messenger of God to sacrifice a lamb in each household. The blood of the lamb was then to be daubed on the doorposts of each Jewish house, so that the Angel of Death would pass over these dwelling places and spare the inhabitants from the terrible fate of the Egyptians, whose first-born sons were to be taken.

As Christians, we read what we call the Old Testament and are often horrified at the apparent blood-thirstiness of God and the ancient peoples. But Kabbalists, the mystics of Judaism, read the Bible just as we in the Work also understand it, as a series of tales to be seen on two levels. There is the literal, physical event, and the metaphysical, inner meaning. No doubt many terrible sacrifices and wars did occur, but both Jewish and Christian mystics, and we in the Work, read the stories as spiritual truths, still valid for us today.

Thus, something of great value - just as a lamb was extremely valuable, especially to ill-fed slaves - must be sacrificed so that we can experience greater freedom.

The Jews could then escape to the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, where their wanderings constituted their time of purgatorial cleansing from all the harmful habits of thought, speech and action they had imbibed as slaves.

Today we see that there are many forms of slavery, and that we are all in some way slaves to our habits. Some have obvious, easily-defined addictions - to alcohol, drugs, sex, co-dependence and so on. These mental and physical enslavements can kill the body: they certainly prevent any spiritual growth while they govern our behaviour.

And there are other, more subtle, types of enslavement, symbolized by the prohibition of hametz during the eight-day festival of the Passover.

Each Jew must ensure his or her house is completely from hametz. Hametz is the leavening agent of baked goods. This may be yeast, baking powder or any similar substance. Sometimes water alone causes the swelling up of flour, and attracts hametz. Bread, many types of cake and other foods are usually leavened, so the house must be cleansed of all crumbs to ensure that no hametz remains within. That is why the Passover is also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when only unleavened baked goods, such as matzoh (a type of crispbread) and specially prepared cakes and other foods may be eaten.

What does this mean for us, in the Work? Hametz, or leaven, is that which puffs up, or inflates, the substance in which it is placed. To us, as to the Kabbalists, this symbolizes pride. Pride, vanity, arrogance, self-importance - these are all at root the same kind of evil; they keep us bound, like slaves, to our False Personality. They keep us from reaching inner freedom.

The process of cleaning out the house to make it free from hametz is undertaken intentionally, with the simultaneous cleansing of our minds and hearts to free them from False Personality I's.

The enactment of this cleansing ritual by Orthodox Jews is very powerful. It involves walking round the home at night by the light of a candle, entering every room, opening cupboards and searching every nook and cranny, and carefully sweeping into a bag all traces of crumbs and yeasted bread that may be found. In fact, to make sure this ritual is fruitful, the head of the household will have carefully put pieces of bread in hard to reach places beforehand, so that the rite can be acted out in full.

 When it is done in this way, the ritual gives to the Higher Emotional Centre an unforgettable image of how we as individuals must undertake our own inner cleansing. We may not have much light, but if we are careful and have the right intention, we can bring that light into all the dark, neglected corners of our False Personality and sweep away the harmful I's that lurk there.

The completion of the ritual is the burning of the hametz. This can take place at the synagogue or in the home; wherever it is done, it involves the gathering in one place of all the crumbs of hametz, and their careful burning in a small fire.

To watch the flames burn away the harmful remains of pride, vanity and arrogance is a very powerful experience. We may symbolically add to the fire all those I's we know must be sacrificed so that we can draw closer to God and experience greater freedom.

When we do this, we symbolically open ourselves to positive energy and create greater possibilities for newness in our lives.

Of course, traditionally it is a rite performed by Orthodox Jews. But anyone may carry it out. More and more, Christians are being invited to take part in Passover seders; in the same way, before attending the seder, many now carry out the hametz cleansing ritual to prepare themselves.

There are obvious parallels here with Easter and the Resurrection. Both tell a similar story. It is our own story, in the Work, as we gradually sacrifice all that is false in us and move towards what is true and of real value - our Essence, and ultimately, Real I. 

A Work task for this time of year is to find examples of our own self-important or arrogant I's, and then deliberately sacrifice them for one day. At the end of the day, write your observations on how successful - or otherwise - you were. Practiced every day for a fortnight, this exercise can be very illuminating in showing you precisely where you need to make sacrifices so that your Essence may be set free.

At the end of this period, the written list may be burned, and the ascending smoke seen as a visible sign of the sacrifice of all the hametz we have noticed in ourselves. A real wish to be free from pride, made as the fire burns, will draw strength from the ritual.

Easter, Sacrifice, and Fifty Days of Rejoicing

Easter is not just the end of Lent. It is the beginning of fifty days of special grace, and is a complete season in itself.

After the forty days' penitence of Lent, when we strove to overcome some particular obstacle to our spiritual development, the joyful Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday proclaims fifty days of rejoicing.

Of course, the full effect of that great and amazing joy is best felt if you've actually observed Lent thoughtfully, and taken it as a Work Aim. To do this means that Imaginary I is sacrificed on Good Friday, and Real I arises on Easter Sunday from the tomb where we have buried it by our mechanicalness.

Practiced annually, and consciously, the Passion Drama can lead to Real I directing our life more and more each year until we truly begin to live more consciously.

If - like so many of us - you've drifted in and out of observance during Lent, now is the time to become aware of the cosmic energies that permeate this special period, and to take advantage of them.

These special energies were known to ancient groups, from the time of the Sarmoung Brotherhood. It was their later continuations, in the form of the Essenes and the Therapeutae, who helped to develop the Christian Year based on the rhythms of those energies as they affect us on Earth.

Before that, the Jewish Year also followed a cycle based on esoteric knowledge, and it was from this that the Christian liturgy was later formed.

Incidentally, recent attempts to persuade churches to adopt a fixed date for Easter betray complete ignorance of these energies. The date of Easter, like that of the Jewish Passover, is calculated based on complex, cosmic events. Easter must fall on the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox. Consequently, it varies from year to year, causing businesses some inconvenience. But it is necessary for this cosmic cycle to be maintained, otherwise the special energies available now will be ignored, and Easter - apart from the celebration of the Resurrection, which itself is now being sidelined or banned in many parts of the world - will be no more significant than any other Bank Holiday.

The Jews were not the only people of the ancient world who knew of the cosmic cycles, and in the Hellenic civilization, the other great sphere of knowledge which helped engender the Christian Year, a dying and rising god (or goddess) was celebrated each year in the various Mysteries.

That deity was a vegetation god, and the dying and rising which featured in the annual celebrations represented the grain harvest, on which civilizations depended.

In the Jewish rituals, however, the regular sacrifices which were offered in the Temple at the great annual feasts were of animals. The inclusion of blood was a vital part of that sacrifice, as the Old Testament clearly shows. Some form of blood offering had to be given throughout the year for various personal reasons, such as atonement for individual sins, purification after childbirth, and so on. In the three annual pilgrimage feasts, those blood offerings took on a central role for the entire Jewish people, atonement for the sins of an entire nation, and reparation for offences against God.

We learn from "All and Everything" that the wise, conscious Messengers who were sent from time to time to recall humanity to greater awareness knew that nature itself required some kind of blood sacrifice. Ordinary men and women were also aware of this, to some extent, but in their unenlightened state they offered human sacrifices. From the Druids of the north to the cannibals around the various parts of the inhabited Earth, regular human sacrifices were made, to the great sorrow of Conscious Humanity.

The practice was particularly virulent in the land of Canaan and surrounding areas, where children were sacrificed to Baal and Moloch.

In their distress at seeing these practices, the wise men and women who had been enlightened by those various Messengers to humanity decided that the best alternative was to substitute animal sacrifices instead of destroying children.

Some form of blood was still needed, so the sacrifices could not be completely stopped. Why? Because nature needs the special higher hydrogens produced by a living organism at death, which Gurdjieff calls the sacred Rascooarno. These energies are used to power physical evolution, and cannot be completely eliminated. But clearly, to sacrifice animals, while still repugnant to those who were more conscious, was better than killing children, and the substituion was gradually introduced.

Gurdjieff tells us that the very same energies of the sacred Rascooarno are also produced when we make an offering of our own suffering, when we deliberately act against our mechanicalness and offer the results to Conscious Humanity. Our conscious suffering, when we see ourselves honestly and without self-justifying, gives even more sacred energy to be used for the evolution of organic life in the universe.

If many more people did this, then no blood sacrifice would be needed at all.

But since we do not, and never have, produced sufficient of this energy to eliminate the need for blood sacrifice, nature obtains it through increasing the number of deaths until the required amount is obtained.

More conscious people practicing the Work would mean fewer mass tragedies, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, and fewer acts of mass murder of the type we now see in the terrorism that is sweeping the whole world through the agency of fundamentalist Islam and other violent groups.

The role of Jesus Christ was to provide the entire Earth, and all human beings for the foreseeable future, with the necessary treasury of higher hydrogens through the medium of His purified blood which fell on the Earth at the time of His Crucifixion.

If we in the Work, and those who attempt to follow the Christian religion, all built on this foundation, offering up our individual suffering to Conscious Humanity, there would be a huge reduction in the number of unnecessary deaths we now see. But the number of conscious people must grow to a critical level before we can see any such reduction, and clearly we are from that number at present.

Other religions too have incorporated this teaching, of course, but none to the extent of Christianity, and none have given the world the huge store of higher hydrogens that Jesus Himself created, and which has been increased ever since by the many saints and martyrs, known and unknown, who follow His teaching.

We can now see how the Christian religion brought together the understanding of the need for a blood offering, as carried out by the Jewish priests in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the dying and rising of the various deities in other traditions current at the time of His death.

Atheists and agnostics who try to discount the significance of the Crucifixion, because the Greeks and Syrians, among others, had acted out the harvest god or goddess ritual, and who claim that Christianity simply copied these, are completely missing the point.

The Crucifixion went far, far beyond the acting out of harvest rituals.

It had to be carried out by a conscious person, the most conscious man who ever lived. And He had to be a Jew, because the Jewish religion understood the need for a blood sacrifice. He had to be raised in that tradition and to understand the whole background of, and reason for, His unique sacrifice. He had to be united with God, the Father, the Holy Sun Absolute, as well as being a truly conscious, human being. And this is indeed what happened.

After He had sacrificed Himself in this way there is now no more need for any blood sacrifices. The animal sacrifices at the Temple ceased when the Temple itself was destroyed, as Christ had foretold. But human lives continue to be wasted by the forces of nature and the mechanicalness of mankind, which becomes a channel for nature to bring about the continuing, necessary blood sacrifices.

Our fifty days of joy, which follow from the Cruficixion, should be the occasion for us in the Work to rejoice in the freedom that mankind now has to overcome tragedy. Our own personal death has been shown to be only a transitional state; the deaths of many has now become unnecessary.

If we redouble our efforts to become conscious now, bearing in mind the great cosmic energies that assist us at this time, we can live joyfully, grateful that our own personal efforts are linked to the huge once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, and that we can contribute - in a small but real way - to the evolution of mankind.

What a cause of joy, indeed!

Palm Sunday and the False "Health and Wealth" Gospel

Yesterday we celebrated Palm Sunday, the day more than two thousand years ago when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. The event was carefully stage managed. Jesus and His disciples knew that the crowds who were pouring into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover would recall the Biblical prophecy that the Messiah would ride into that city on a donkey before proclaiming his power.

What the crowds wanted was a Messiah who would be a combination of Braveheart and Santa Claus, had they ever heard those names. Someone who would lead them to a military victory over the occupying Romans, and rout those hated rulers forever. Someone who would restore the Kingdom of Israel to full autonomy, bringing about material peace and prosperity for all.

But that's not what - or Who - they got.

Instead, there came this poor, homeless prophet and a bunch of very dubious-looking disciples. They were dusty, dirty and in need of refreshment themselves. They preached the good news of the coming Kingdom, but it was not to be a Kingdom of this world, as Jesus made absolutely clear. No, it was a Kingdom of Righteousness, Truth and Mercy, the veritable Kingdom of God, but it was not going to change things on the ground.

The crowds who cheered and shouted for Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem were exactly like those today who follow the so-called "Health and Wealth" gospel, or who cling to false New Age practices. They want redemption by means of a set prayer, or through hanging crystals in their windows, or saying affirmations.. They want easy rewards; they don't understand the reality of the spiritual path,  that it leads invariably by way of the Cross to the Crown.

You can see them on television, on the numerous evangelical channels where preachers tell their audiences that if they only believe in Jesus, He will heal every physical and mental problem and send them loads of dosh.  They hover round the New Age shops buying magic candles or the latest self-help book that promises them that wishful thinking can actually work.

Since the audiences for this kind of twaddle are usually poor, uneducated and downtrodden people, they're only too eager to swallow this farago of lies, and in the belief that these preachers can help them reach their material goals they often send in their own hard-won money to nudge God into action.

But even well-educated Christians can believe this false gospel.

After all, it's very comforting - to believe that all you have to do is repeat a few prayers and say the right affirmations, and everything you want will be given to you.

But it's not true! Jesus never, ever promised health or wealth to His followers. Instead, He told them they would have "tribulation" in the world, but they were to be of "good cheer", because He had overcome the world.

Catholics, most Anglicans and the Orthodox Churches follow the original gospel of Jesus, not the fake New Age-y version. We know that the truths Jesus came to reveal included that of the necessity of suffering, of carrying our own cross and bearing others' burdens as well.

A new book, When You Suffer by Jeff Cavins, explains very well the meaning of suffering and why it is so important. It's not advanced theology, it's simply a well-written, easy to understand explanation of the role of suffering in the life of the Christian, and why it is not to be rejected but embraced.

Suffering, Cavins says, when it's borne cheerfully and with grace, endows us with a sort of "heavenly cash" that we may use for the benefit of others. He describes a time when, in tremendous pain from a neck injury, he knelt by the bedside of his young daughter and prayed for her. This experience, he says, taught him more than anything he'd ever read about the power of suffering, and why God allows it - even decrees it.

In this, of course, Cavins is expounding something very like the Work. Indeed, if we substitute for the word "cash" the term "higher hydrogens",  it is exactly the Work teaching. And that should not surprise us; Gurdjieff always said that the Fourth Way was the teaching of esoteric Christianity, and there is much of it to be found in exoteric Christianity too.

We in the Work know that "our Being attracts our life", and that suffering will inevitably be part of our progress, if only the suffering that results from seeing the truth about ourselves. But extra suffering, physical and mental, may also be what we need in order to create our own "heavenly cash", by which we can evolve and contribute our share to the workings of Conscious Humanity

The Palm Sunday crowds wanted their Santa Claus Messiah, but we actually need the Messiah who came to suffer and die for us. Only by undergoing the terrible, horrifically painful and humiliating death of crucifixion, and then entering into the caverns of the underworld before returning to the world in the joyful burst of light that was the Resurrection, could everything in heaven and earth be given the chance of redemption.

Only in that particular, shocking way could Jesus create enough spiritual energy - Cavins's "heavenly cash" and our "higher hydrogens" - to purify the Earth and maintain the redemptive possibility for aeons to come.

Mrs Pogson emphasized that the purified blood of Christ, spilled on the ground at the Crucifixion, was so illuminated, so permeated with higher energies, that it had enough power to transform the world from then until now, and as far as we can imagine into the future.

And Jesus knew that we, too, needed to share in this suffering, to join our own trials and pains to those which He underwent on the Cross, in order for us to grow in spirit.

No amount of money could provide this growth. No wealth could buy our way out of it. Suffering is the price we pay for our own progress, and the debt we repay to Conscious Humanity when we willingly accept our share.

Our own evolution is inextricably bound up with that of humanity and life as a whole. That is the Good News of the real gospel, and it knocks the false "health and wealth" claims into a cocked hat.

When we remember the acclamations of the Palm Sunday crowds, let us also remember where Jesus's journey led him - to Calvary and to the empty tomb.

That is the real, the only truth.

The Love of God: Unconditional Positive Regard in Counselling

As Easter approaches, Christians contemplate the Passion of Christ and ponder on what the love of God might mean for us fallen human beings. It is a term not often heard today outside a religious setting, but it used to signify a plea for understanding, for mercy, a desperate cry - "Oh, for the love of God!"

But what do we, in fact, mean by "the love of God"? As a counsellor, I have asked myself whether it's identical with the idea of "Unconditional Positive Regard".  And can we experience the love of God in this life?

Carl Rogers coined the term "Unconditional Positive Regard" (UPR) to describe the state of respect, acceptance, benevolence and goodwill which he believed counsellors must exhibit towards clients if therapy is to be successful.

It can happen only when the counsellor puts aside all his or her preconceptions and simply listens, with total acceptance, to whatever the client says. There must be neither fear, disgust, nor rejection, if the client is to speak freely.

Some time ago I wrote a post on the way that counselling - at the very highest level of practice - is identical to the Work idea of "external considering". It is actually a form of self-remembering. The counsellor, while remaining fully aware of her own psychological processes, is completely open to, and aware of, what the client is communicating. This double attention is difficult to achieve and takes years of training and experience.

When practiced with awareness and coupled with empathy and the counsellor's own willingness to be honest about her reactions to what the client is saying, UPR is almost magical in its effects.

Let me give you two case histories when UPR proved crucial to healing, and you will see what I mean.

The first is of an 82-year-old lady (I use that term deliberately, as Emily was a well-brought-up, well-spoken, beautifully-dressed and extremely polite person). She had been referred to me by her doctor, who in turn had been contacted by the local magistrate.

 Emily (of course, this is not her real name) had been caught in the act of shoplifting an expensive bottle of perfume from the most upmarket store in her home town. Instead of sending her to jail or sentencing her to do community work, neither of which would have been appropriate or helped her at all, the magistrate recommended she receive counselling through her doctor's surgery, and this was how she came to be sitting in front of me one sunny morning, a lace handkerchief pressed to her weeping eyes.

During that first session Emily hardly spoke except to express remorse and shame. How could she have done it, she repeatedly asked herself. How terrible that she should have ended up in court! What would her mother have said! Or her children! How could look them in the face! And so on, for the full fifty minutes that constitute a counselling hour.

At the end, she made another appointment for the following week. And that followed a similar pattern, with prolonged weeping and remorseful reflections, until I began to wonder whether anything worthwhile was possible. All the time, I gave Emily my full attention. I noticed my own concern and compassion for her, and expressed these feelings to her in gentle tones so as not to disrupt her inner flow, but letting her know that I was fully there for her, completely on her side, not judging her but seeking to understand.

It was not until the third session that Emily began to talk about what had happened. She had stolen the perfume on her birthday. She was now alone in life, having been married but then widowed, and living far from both her children. Although they had sent birthday cards, she had received no presents, and she felt lonely and unloved. And, as always happened on her birthday, she had begun to experience sad, unsettling memories of her own unloving mother.

Now that she was totally at ease in my presence, Emily confided that she felt her mother had never loved her. And - from what she said - it seemed to be true. Emily's mother had done little but criticize and belittle her daughter and treat her as a thorough nuisance in the lives of herself and Emily's father. They had not wanted a child, Emily said, and her mother had wished that she could have a miscarriage. If abortion had been legal then, Emily would never have been born.

Knowing little of real love at home, Emily predictably married as early as she could to get away from her unkind parents. Just as predictably, she chose an unloving, cold, detached husband. Her husband did want children, and treated Emily as a combination of breeding cow and housekeeper. His death brought Emily some release, but she remained distant from her own children and basically alone.

The theft, she realized with gradual understanding, had been her "cry for help". She had symbolically stolen the love she so much needed from her mother and her husband, both now dead. Perfume symbolized femininity to Emily, as well as a gift, and she had never felt validated as a woman, a daughter or a mother. She therefore stole the gift she had longed for so much in order to comfort herself and feel loved, but it left her guilt-ridden, hollow, ashamed.

Therapy began when she saw the real nature of her situation, and healing followed fairly swiftly after she had faced these sad truths. I was able to reassure Emily that her mother had been mentally ill, and this lifted a burden from Emily's shoulders. She had felt that her mother had not loved her because she - Emily - was unlovable. Children always blame themselves for a parent's failures in regard to themselves, and Emily had simply suffered her way through life feeling unlovable and undeserving.

Of course, there was much sadness at this realization, but also hope. When she left my care, after eight more sessions, she was a different person - lighter, happier, more self-aware. She had not been loved, but she could now love herself and give affection and time to others. She joined a coffee club at her local church and began volunteering at a charity shop. The later years of her life were far happier than her childhood and earlier adulthood had been.

The other case study I want to present to you is that of a much younger woman. In her early thirties, Shelley had married six months previously and had come to me distraught because she had discovered her husband was spending huge sums of money on sex-chat lines. Of course, it was not so much the money that troubled her but the act of rejection that these phone calls implied.  If her husband loved her, why did he need to do this? Was she at fault? What could she do?

It was only after several sessions skating over the surface of her life and gradually establishing trust that Shelley began to open her heart to me. And what she disclosed was horrible. It emerged that she had been sexually abused by her own grandfather, from the ages of four until seven, when the grandfather was placed in a care home. She had never told anyone of this. Fear and shame had dogged her life ever since and she had chosen as a husband someone who confirmed her own sense of worthlessness.

Floods of tears accompanied this memory. The worst part was when she remembered the actual abuse, of course, and the feelings of dread she still experienced when she passed the street where the grandfather used to live.

Again, children blame themselves for the evil deeds that are done to them, and Shelley thought she herself must have somehow been at fault. Of course, this is quite absurd, but to the child it makes a kind of sense. Other children escape abuse, therefore there must be something wrong with a child who becomes a victim.

Much of the remaining therapy was devoted to rebuilding Shelley's self-esteem. By the end of our time together she had come to see that she had chosen someone who sexually abused her, just as her grandfather did, because this was the only kind of intimate relationship she had ever known.

When she came for a follow-up session, I was very glad to see that she had initiated a divorce and started a local group for incest survivors. She, too, was a changed person.

Shelley told me that she had tried to get counselling when she was younger, but had never felt able to tell the counsellor what had actually happened and therefore no healing ever took place. With me, she said, she knew that I would not judge or criticize her, and felt she could trust me with the terrible truth.

Here, I believe, is the effect of showing another person Unconditional Positive Regard. Or, as we may otherwise call it, simply love. For it is a kind of love that the counsellor shows the client, based not on their own respective personal qualities but simply on the act of witnessing another's pain. The counsellor is both an active and passive witness. She is active in the sense that she reacts with the client's own pain, sharing it and going through the terrible experience with her, and passive in the way she does not condemn the client, nor does she try to limit the client's disclosures.

 There can be no limits to what is shared in the counselling office, nothing that cannot be disclosed. And with the living through of old traumas in the presence of a loving witness, healing begins.

It is not too far-fetched to call this form of witnessing an example of the love of God.

Why? Because the counsellor does not create the love that is mediated in her office. The love comes through her, not from her. The love comes from the Source of all Love, God Himself.

If a counsellor does not believe in God, that makes no difference to the process. She may name it differently, talking about the human healing situation, or the absence of judgement. But to me, it most certainly is a kind of love, and it is the only way that real healing can occur. And I know that it does not come from me, but flows through me, from a higher source altogether; from what we call in the Work, Conscious Humanity, the head of whom is Jesus.

Of course, that love is subtly different from that which we experience with friends or family, and from what we feel for our spouse. Hopefully we neither judge nor condemn the people we love in our daily lives, but we do make demands on them, fulfill their own needs, and share our joys and sorrows with them.

When we love a client in this way of healing, we know that part of that love is to let them go at the end of it, to avoid creating a dependence that would be harmful to the client. There have been many clients whose company I've missed, many that I've wanted to follow up and to find out what has been going on in their lives.  Yet I cannot do so.  That would be violating their boundaries, and I have no right to hear any more from them. Indeed, I have a duty to discourage them if they should seem to be getting dependent on me in any way.

In this, it differs from the love of God. God always wants to hear from us, He is present in our lives at every instant, whether or not we acknowledge Him, and He never lets us go. But it is similar in the way that God never forces Himself on us, never demands that we listen to Him. He leaves us free to make that choice.

I don't press my religious views on my clients, because that too would violate a boundary and could prevent them from fully trusting me. But I usually wear a cross, and generally have a small cross or rosary, or perhaps an icon, on the wall of my office, along with other art works. If the client asks me about my faith, I'm happy to answer.

The rest is God's work.

How Prayers For The Dead Can Heal Your Family Tree

Yesterday I wrote about praying for the dead. Some people think this practice is truly bizarre, but those of Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox Christian or Jewish background understand completely why this is necessary.

But we can go still further. Besides praying for the well being of those who have passed away, we can actually bring healing to living family members - including ourselves - through prayers for the dead.

How? It's all explained in an excellent book, "Healing Your Family Tree", by Dr. Kenneth McAll.

And by a truly extraordinary piece of synchronicity that very book arrived at my house just as soon as I'd finished writing yesterday's post!

I'd ordered it weeks ago and had despaired of its ever arriving. I thought it would give some clues as to the origins of various familial problems which are clearly connected to both genetics (our faulty DNA) and family environments.

To my great delight, however, this book not only answers many questions in connection with how family problems may be passed down through the generations, it gives explicit guidance on how these problems may be healed. It shows how spiritual illnesses, as well as physical diseases, may be passed down and cause problems in the present. And it shows the way that all such diseases, whether of the body, mind or spirit, may be healed.

In previous posts I've looked at how our DNA carries the seeds of serious problems in our own lives and those of our families. It is becoming ever more apparent that here lie many of the physical origins of problems such as alcoholism, addictions of all kinds, mental illnesses and so on. We know now that various genetic flaws predispose some of us to addictive diseases and mental problems. There are known genes for opiate addiction, alcoholism, mood swings, and a sort of catch-all mental problem gene - the so-called "Warrior Gene" - which seems to compound many such addictions.

We also know that healing of all kinds comes ultimately from God, and His help is being sought quite openly by those who accept the Twelve Step programs.

Counselling, medication, family therapy and all sorts of interventions can work wonders in dealing with the symptoms of these deep-seated illnesses. But, as Jung said, no true healing is possible unless it takes place in the spirit, because all addictions - and many other mental problems, too - are actually spiritual problems manifesting in the physical sphere.

Those who've traced their family trees can often see these problems going back for many generations. Sometimes they seem to skip a generation, but generally, in every family, there are living members and ancestors who are known as the black sheep of the family, the ones that nobody talks about.

As an alcoholic who, thank God, has not had a drink for more than 25 years, I was especially interested in tracing the origins of this problem in my own family. True enough, in each generation I found someone who seemed especially problematic. He or she was known for a drinking problem, sometimes compounded with other physical and mental problems.

An alcoholic parent will not only pass on the alcoholic gene to some or all his children, he will also raise them in an unhealthy atmosphere. Until the actual genes were discovered, we could not be sure  whether it was nurture or nature that caused the alcoholism. Today, we see it is a combination of both.

To me, this is a clear indication of what is meant by "original sin". There are faults in our DNA, in our very Essence, which must be healed before true spiritual progress may be made. It could well be that it is for that very purpose that each alcoholic, each addict has chosen to become incarnated today, when so much help is available to heal these diseases. And our own healing efforts can stretch backwards and forwards, into the past and into the future, affecting all those related to us who may have suffered spiritual sickness and passing on a cleansed, renewed heritage to our children.

Dr McAll's book points out that as well as healing those now living, who suffer from inherited addictions and other illnesses, we also need to heal the dead. It may be those deceased ancestors, unhealed and so unable or unwilling to pass further into the afterlife, and who could have attracted evil spirits, who could be causing many of the problems of living family members.

He gives numerous examples of how this can happen. He points out that God can allow unhealed souls to linger, dogging the following generations, waiting until someone, usually one of their descendants, eventually realizes the true nature of the problem and prays for and with them.

Many of these ancestors will have rejected the Christian faith of their families, or else were raised with no faith at all. Many were never baptised, and others have turned their backs on God. The Bible speaks of "generational curses", and it could well be that in many families today this is what is happening, and why so many people are still unhealed despite the best efforts of their friends and families.

Perhaps our ancestors dabbled in the occult and attracted evil spirits, which are now attached to living family members. Maybe they took part in magical rituals, read the tarot or sold horoscopes for financial gain rather than knowledge and understanding, or tried to contact the dead through a medium or a ouija board. Any of these activities, however innocently entered into, creates a psychic "leak" and issues an invitation for an evil spiritual entity to come in, which can then obsess a family tree for many generations.

Dr McAll emphasizes the need to pray for these ancestors by name, if we know it; if we don't, we must pray to be given a name under which they may be interceded for. We can then baptise them into the Christian faith and hold a Eucharistic service for them, in which the healing powers of Jesus's body and blood are applied to the sick and suffering ancestor, and that ancestor is released from whatever is holding them and us in bondage.

Releasing them brings healing and peace to the living family members. And in this way, an entire family tree may be healed.

Dr McAll is an Anglican psychiatrist, and his book approaches the question of family curses in a thoroughly Biblical, Christian way.  If you don't accept this approach, you will gain nothing from reading this book.

But for anyone with an open mind who has noted recurring patterns of physical illness, addictions, mental illness and other problems in their own family, this book could be the way to ending all such suffering.

Readers already in recovery and following the Twelve Steps, and especially if they are also in the Work, will have seen great healing result from the influx of divine energies into their life.  Dr McAll is suggesting that we may extend this healing to everyone in our family tree who has ever suffered from such problems, and thus put a complete end to any and all curses that may have attached themselves to our family.

As he says, "In all cases of bondage the best efforts of psychiatry should be utilized to integrate the personality, but it is essential that they are used in conjunction with prayer and the Eucharist service, which has the power both to break the destructive bondage and to form life-giving bonds with Jesus Christ".

Amen.

Note: I'm indebted to Phil Rickman, author of the very successful Merrily Watkins deliverance ministry series of thrillers, for mentioning this book.

What is the Communion of Saints?

The Communion of Saints - a concept familiar to every Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox Christian  - simply means that we, as Christians, are connected with all other believers and people of good will, both living and dead.

Death does not separate us from them.

We may call the Communion of Saints by its Work name, Conscious Humanity, although, strictly speaking, only the more spiritually advanced members of that communion may be called conscious. Nevertheless, all of us in the Work belong to the Communion of Saints, even if more through desire than through achievement.

And it's not only those who were Christian during their lifetime who are included in this community. Sufis, Buddhists, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, those who have been Good Householders although they may never have followed any particular religion, together with everyone who has lived according to their conscience, may eventually be admitted to this group.

Brother John of the Carmelite Order used to preach that after death there will lots of people who, meeting Jesus for the first time, will exclaim in wonder "So it was You, all the time, and I didn't know!You were the One who healed my child, saved my life, gave me the courage to carry on! Thank You!"

Not everyone will reach Paradise all at once, of course, because we're not fit for it as we are. And Paradise is, in any case, "Only good for two-three days", according to Gurdjieff. What we shall do after we've enjoyed a well-earned rest will depend on us, our abilities, our deepest wishes, and on God and His many helpers, the saints, angels, and archangels.

We may be put to work maintaining the balance of energies on a particular planet; to educating young souls about to incarnate; to helping those in Purgatory to endure the pain of remorse and repentance. We don't know; it's not entirely up to us, in any case. But we believe that death is only a veil, a curtain, which separates those alive on Earth from those already in a different dimension, and that communication between us is still possible.

We are all working for a common aim, the perfecting of our being and the subsequent coming of the Kingdom of God.

We Catholics know that, when we pray to the saints for help, they respond. Proof of this is given daily in the form of miraculous happenings, both great and small. Some have been solidly proven by medical and scientific evidence, the criteria the Vatican uses to decide who is to be recognized as a bone fide Catholic saint.

We know that we may also pray to - and for - our ancestors. Many cultures, both Eastern and Western, encourage the setting up of family shrines in the home, where we can remember our dead and pray to and for them.

Gurdjieff believed that doing so helps us and them. He gave several examples of this type of prayer, from the need to pray for our direct family ancestors (and thus help our "grandfathers" and those even earlier than that generation) to the way in which one person's ancestor (in this case, Gurdjieff's own mother, who had passed away) could help the mother of a Work student.

Daily, in the Catholic church, Masses are offered for the dead. We believe this confers great honour on the deceased one, and helps him or her in the afterlife, wherever they may be. In Work language, we are dedicating a quantity of the very highest, finest energy - that of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ - to those we honour in this way.We also ask our dead loved ones to pray for us, just as we petition the saints to do the same. We are all one family, and we help one another.

No, our family dead are not necessarily out and out saints, not yet, but they are closer than we are to the miraculous realm where Conscious Humanity lives, and they can add their prayers to ours in cases of need.

What is the post-death state like? And will we all be part of Conscious Humanity one day?

All religions believe in some sort of afterlife. The Jewish and Christian faiths postulate a post-death period of assessment, where our next destination will be decided. We Christians call it Purgatory.

Purgatory is not a state of physical torture; it is the place where, with great compassion and empathy, we are helped by those more conscious than ourselves to relive the unrepented sins of our earthly life, and to make atonement for them by our sincere remorse.

Painful, yes. And this is the reason why we are urged, in the Jewish and Christian faiths and most of all in the Work, which is Esoteric Christianity, to repent - undergo metanoia - in our present life. Those sins, those errors, we have committed need to be faced and accepted before we can proceed any further.

It is this belief which underlies the practice, common to many religions and to the Twelve Step programs, of taking a personal inventory at the end of the day. I prefer to do this during the day, so that problems may be dealt with as they come up, but either way is fine. What is certain is that we will have no escape from facing our own sinful, mechanical nature, and we can either do this now, on Earth, or later, in Purgatory. The choice is ours.

A modern Kabbalistic interpretation of Purgatory says that after we die we are placed in a private cinema, with a comfortable chair and a large screen. The film of our life is then projected for us to view, over and over again, until we have repented for the evil, the mechanical acts, we have committed. Then, and only then, may we allowed to ascend to the next stage of our existence.

What will that stage be like?

Marian, my Work teacher, explained that the substance of our Essence is immortal and therefore cannot be physically destroyed in the same way that our bodies can. After death, if someone has remained asleep all their lives, if they have not worked on themselves at all, if they have stifled the voice of their conscience and lived mechanically, their body will decay and their Essence will be thrown back into the melting pot. Nothing of them will survive, because they had not achieved any individuality.

This is Work teaching, and of course it is subtly different from the exoteric, Christian, doctrine.

If, on the other hand, we have begun to wake up, then our spiritual journey is commencing. We will be sent again and again into incarnation so that every lesson we need to learn can be fully assimilated. Only then will we be allowed to remain in "Heaven", however we picture that realm.

For me, it's a world of education, activity, and purpose. It's the fount of order in the universal battle against entropy. It's the state we picture ourselves in when we yearn to be of use to God. And if we follow our conscience, one day we shall certainly find ourselves there, with all the necessary Higher Being Bodies that we have created with the help of Conscious Humanity, which will give us the ability to survive in that rarefied atmosphere.

The Way of the Good Householder will eventually lead there, especially if followed in conjunction with one of the true religions.

For us in the Work, we are following the Way of Accelerated Completion. We hope to reach our destination more quickly than if we simply followed an exoteric religion, but there are no guarantees.

 In the meantime, we need all the help we can get, and praying to the saints, both known and unknown, who are part of Conscious Humanity will help us in more ways than we can possibly imagine.

Please note that, although we are encouraged to pray to the dead, and to offer our own prayers for them, we are not to contact them through a medium or any other occult activity. This is strictly forbidden by all religions and by the Work. Why? Because it is an illegitimate method of communicating with the dead, and calls on the astral realm rather than the spiritual dimension. This being so, all sorts of mischievous, possibly very evil, entities may respond and pretend to be the person summoned when they are nothing of the kind.

I have personally experienced this realm when in the presence of a medium, even though I did not give her permission to call on the dead and did not realize that this was what she was doing. The frightening consequence was only too real, and I have heard of others who also experienced this type of happening while physically in the presence of a medium. If we have not asked for it, the evil realm - the "sitra achra", or other side, in Hebrew - does not have permission to stay, so the remedy is to pray to God and ask for it to be stopped. This is always effective. But it is much better not to court this sort of experience at all. Some types of evil entities are very hard to dismiss.

Real communication with the dead takes places through the spiritual realm, without any medium, and always with the understanding that God may allow it or may prevent it for a particular reason. This is the only legitimate way.

That said, I do have a family shrine in my own house, where I honour the living and dead members of my family and pray for their wellbeing every day. And I ask for their prayers, too, because we are all members of the Communion of Saints, even though some of us are only potentially, not actually, thorough going saints!

Sometimes the dead may communicate with us directly, through a dream sent via the Higher Emotional Centre. This is a very powerful experience, very cleansing and fructifying. And while it should not be sought, neither should it be ignored. It is useful to write it down so that we don't forget the content, and can meditate on it later for guidance.

My personal practice is to pray to the saints, especially St Therese of Lisieux, when in particular need of enlightenment or understanding. There are saints for every type of problem, however, as you will find if you study the saints of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. They are all much closer to God than we are, and they invite our prayers. They long to help us, because in helping us, they help God Himself.

 And that is the purpose of the Communion of Saints - a great mutual-help society, formed of goodwill and spiritual energy, a tremendous source of help which we are foolish to ignore.

Why Gurdjieff Says We Need A "Critical Mind" In The Work

"It is useless to come here unless you have a critical mind".

Thus read one of the sayings attached to the wall of the Study House at the Prieure.

At first glance, this sounds a little odd. When we think of a "critical mind" in a Life context, we probably associate the phrase with someone who's always arguing, objecting or putting up difficulties. Such a person is emphatically not suited to the Work unless they can overcome such unhelpful habits of thinking.

 If they have Magnetic Centre and find their way to a group, the teacher will have her own work cut out in trying to help the student to discard these bad habits. And they may be so ingrained that a student is quite unable to rid themselves of this type of purely negative thinking, and will have to leave the Work altogether.

What, then, did Gurdjieff himself mean by the phrase "a critical mind", and why is it so essential for  work on ourselves?

First, we need to remind ourselves that our Intellectual Centre consists of two major areas, one positive and one negative. Unlike the Emotional Centre, which ideally does not have a negative division - a situation achieved usually only after years of painful work on ourselves - the Intellectual Centre is meant to have a negative part.

Why? Because without it, we could not evaluate ideas. We would be unable to compare, contrast, assess and either accept or discard thoughts and theories. We would have no way of evaluating the Work, for how is one to do this if one cannot compare it with other systems, and see where the Work differs or agrees with them?

For most people starting out in the Work today, a university education is part of their background. If they have been well taught at undergraduate level, they will know how to weigh up different ideas and how to assess their value. There will still be a lot of old ideas that will need discarding, but they will have been trained in the basic thinking processes that give them the expertise to do this.

If they can avoid the trap of "wiseacring" - indulging in pointless speculation for its own sake rather than as an aid to enlightenment, something all too common in academia - their Intellectual Centre will be able to help them in the Work. It will be much easier for someone with a well trained mind to eventually achieve metanoia.

Yet a degree isn't vital when it comes to studying and practicing the Work. Gurdjieff himself had studied at a military academy, but he did not have a university education as we know it. Although many of his male students did have such a background, his female students usually did not. University education was widely closed to women before the middle part of the 20th century, and even then a woman had to be unusually gifted and persevering before she could be accepted at a university.

What is vital, however, is that the student should have undergone some sort of mental training that will help him or her to separate ideas, weigh them, evaluate them and - in the case of the Work - apply them. If she does not possess such a background, her teacher will instruct her to study the type of material that will help in developing her mind. She may be asked to read theology, or philosophy, or science, and then to evaluate the ideas in a cogent manner. It is hard going, but it is necessary.

Without the ability to do this, there can be no progress in the Work.

While it's obvious that the type of person I mentioned at the start of this post, the chronically negative, complaining individual who loves to argue for its own sake, is not likely to last long in the Work unless they are willing to change these profoundly unhelpful habits of thought, the opposite type is just as difficult to teach.

I'm thinking now of the student who's read each and every self-help book, studied every esoteric system, as far their mental capacity allows, and who completely approves of them all. Such a person can't possibly appreciate the Work, because they can't understand how the Work differs from all other systems. They have no critical ability.

Such a student may have read, say, Louise Hay, and loved it. They loved it so much they got identified with it! Then they went on to read A Course In Miracles, and loved that too. Again, they became identified. When the Celestine Prophecies came along they devoured that too, as they did with The Power of Now, Rosicrucianism, Anthroposophy and everything else they could find.

They did not ponder each system of ideas. They did not see how each differs subtly from the rest, how each has helpful ideas but also theories which contradict other systems. Because they did not perceive these differences, they accepted them all uncritically, and when they met the Work they could not see how it differed from all their previous studies. They simply tried to add it on to what they had already read, and the result was a muddle.

It's as though such a student has gulped down everything they could find and has a monumental case of mental indigestion!

Asking them to explain how each system differs from the others, and to outline each one's stronger and weaker aspects, let alone compare any of them to the Work, proves fruitless. They identified with each set of ideas as they came across them, and they are so thoroughly glued to them that they can't break free and judge them objectively.

They have completely neglected to apply the negative side of their Intellectual Center. They probably didn't even know they had one. And unless this sort of casual, uncritical acceptance of any and all "spiritual" ideas can be broken, such a student will not get very far in the Work.

Unless we can begin to think in a new way - to undergo a true metanoia, or repentance - we will stay at the same level. We will not progress. The Work contains many fertilizing ideas that can shock us into thinking differently, more profoundly. But we need to reflect on, not just uncritically swallow, these ideas.

To ponder in the Work sense means to apply both the Emotional and the Intellectual Centres in thinking about a Work idea. We can often feel the good of the Work before we can truly understand it, but the work on Knowledge - carried out by the correct functioning of the Intellectual Centre - is absolutely vital to spiritual growth.

All genuine thinking, says Dr Nicoll, requires an effort, and this is something that people are generally unwilling to make. Without real effort in the Intellectual Centre, however, the Work will fall on stony ground. It will lead nowhere.

We must constantly evaluate what we have heard and read about the Work. We must "think longer thoughts", as Gurdjieff said. Unless we do this, we will not be able to change our thoughts, will not undergo this essential metanoia, which Jesus Christ and all the great spiritual teachers have urged.

We must discard our mechanical associations, our mechanical likes and dislikes. We must thoroughly digest and apply the Work ideas until we can think about Life from the point of view of the Work - and not the other way round.

When we do this, Dr Nicoll says, "You will begin to occupy higher divisions of the Intellectual Centre, and through this maybe you will change the state of your being".

Maybe,

There are no guarantees, but genuine effort and perseverance will meet with eventual understanding. And that is the use, the necessity, of having what Gurdjieff calls "a critical mind".

"Courageously and even joyously"

The above phrase is taken from a beautiful prayer that is said every day by members of a Catholic apostolate.

In context, it is "Lord ... bless my brothers and sisters ... and may we all glorify you and give proof of our love for you by bearing courageously and even joyously the cross which is ours" (my italics).

The prayer is spoken each morning by members of a Catholic apostolate for people with chronic sickness or disabilities, CUSA (Catholic Union of the Sick in America). It's part of a longer prayer, and there is also an evening prayer which accompanies their night time reflections. During the day, members are encouraged to raise their hearts and minds to God, and to remember that they carry a cross which, though painful and hard to bear, can bring healing to others and to mankind as a whole.

Despite its name, CUSA is international, with members in many countries who keep in touch with each other by letter or email, in smaller groups, and encourage one another to grow spiritually through the "joyous" acceptance of their crosses. Each group has a spiritual adviser who is a member of a religious order and who also suffers long-term sickness or disability.

In its attitude to suffering, CUSA is very close to the Work teaching.

The Catholic church, as far as I know, is the only Christian organization which has preserved Christ's sublime teaching on suffering. It tells us that when we offer up our personal suffering, whether physical or mental, we assist suffering people all over the world, and even assist Jesus Christ in his plan for the redemption of mankind.

St Paul exhorts us to join to Jesus's passion on the Cross all the suffering that is ours on Earth, and to bear all things with calmness and patience, including the difficult knowledge of our own inadequacy to the task.

Gurdjieff actually showed us how this cross-bearing could help others, could even help God. He taught that when we bear misfortunes and suffering with patience and goodwill, we create a very fine substance that God needs for his saving work, and which helps the universe to evolve. This substance he called "higher hydrogens".

All of us, Gurdjieff said, will release a quantity of this energy when we die. But, if we wish, we may also participate in God's plan for salvation by acting against our self-will during life, by bearing one another's unpleasant manifestations, by accepting all the many kinds of suffering that come our way and refusing to be defeated by them.

Of course, suffering takes many forms. One particular type, which all of us in the Work must bear, is that of seeing ourselves as we really are, with all our mechanicalness, negativity and ill-will. We must  look at the harm our False Personality causes, the many I's within us that harbour negativity, resentment, and so on. When we truly see all this without flinching and without turning away from it, we open the way for our own transformation and for the fine energy of creation, the higher hydrogens, to be released.

Catholic Christians, if they honestly try to live out their faith, are faced with the truth of themselves in their daily self-examination and also when they make confession to a priest. We're encouraged to leave nothing out, but to be completely honest and unsparing in our account of ourselves and the sins we've committed "in thought and in word, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do". And we ask for the prayers of others, especially the saints, to help us in our determination to avoid sin in the future. We know that the communion of saints is real, and that we can all help one another - both the living and those gone before us - in the great work of spiritual growth.

In the Work, it is our daily task to note the ways in which we continually fail to live up to our ideals, fail to keep our aim. But we don't become discouraged because of this - far from it! We know this honest facing of our failures is the necessary prerequisite to spiritual growth. We fail anyway, so to be given the opportunity to actually see what we are like, and how we behave, think and feel, is a tremendous blessing. We don't judge ourselves, we don't criticize ourselves for our failures. That is simply the way we are. We accept this knowledge, and resolve to renew our efforts.

God does not judge or criticize us when we are honest with Him. Jesus did not condemn the woman taken in adultery, but told her go and sin no more. That is what we must do, as Work students, as would-be Christians.

Members of AA do this each day when they take their inventory. Again, it is not an instrument of condemnation but an aid to greater self-knowledge, and to be welcomed. The love of God is made plain in the AA community, where AA members can be honest with one another and can forgive and help to heal the wounded member. M. Scott Peck says that AA shows what a truly Christian community would be like. And the same is true for all AA's offshoot organizations - Alanon, Narcotics Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous, and so on.

As well as the burden of self-knowledge, the additional crosses we are given vary with each individual. For some, they will be the trials imposed by those we live with and care about - the sick, the addicted, the continual calls on our love and goodwill.

For alcoholics and addicts it includes their particular addiction, along with the character defects that accompany it. There are many, too, who struggle with other forms of addiction, such as codependence, sex addiction, compulsive helping, addiction to spending, and much more.

For members of CUSA, as well as for many who've never heard of that organization, our crosses include chronic, ongoing physical and mental suffering which is part of daily lot and which would, without spiritual insight, become a means of destroying our faith and our hope.

Some members are physically disabled, like me. Many readers know that I use a wheelchair for much of the time and cope with various types of pain and disability as a result of a near-fatal car crash I experienced in 1983. The effects of that crash on my body will never disappear, and will get worse each year. But in contrast, the spiritual benefits - the insights, the understanding, the ability to carry my own cross, and much more - have been beyond all I could have imagined. The apparent catastrophe has been turned into a blessing, thank God. And it's the Work, the teaching of esoteric Christianity, which has brought about this reversal.

I'm also tremendously grateful to the many Catholic saints, such as St Therese of Lisieux, Padre Pio, and St John Paul II, who have offered us the example of their own suffering willingly borne and who have shown us the way to carry our own cross. And as well as trying to imitate their superb example, we can profit from their prayers. They understand suffering because, like Jesus, they have undergone it themselves. A god, a saint, who is beyond all pain and who had never suffered would be useless to us who must cope with suffering on Earth.

You don't have to be a Catholic to understand this teaching, but it definitely helps, because the church upholds and promotes the value of suffering whilst other churches - and the world at large - see suffering as quite useless. It is one of the reasons why Gurdjieff said the Catholic church was a true religious path, along with the Orthodox Churches; most Protestants have largely lost sight of the true value of suffering.

Other members of CUSA have serious mental problems, such as schizophrenia or depression; yet others battle with chronic, progressive conditions such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's diseases.

But what joins us all together in CUSA is our love of God and our determination to use the crosses we have been given as a way of coming closer to Him and of taking part in his plan of salvation for the world.

And the phrase that I carry round with me at all times is that which I've quoted in the title of this post - "courageously and even joyously".

What a wonderful exhortation! And how impossible it sounds when we first hear it! We would all agree that courage is needed to bear our individual cross, but how can that cross possibly be carried "joyously"?

How can we be glad that we're physically handicapped, or mentally ill, or suffering the scourge of alcoholism? How can this possibly be turned to joy?

The answer is, of course, because it brings us closer to God, and most particularly to the sufferings God experiences in the person of Jesus.

Anyone who makes a serious effort to carry their cross not only with courage but also with joy will find a wonderful new energy, so fine as to be almost imperceptible at first, filling their spirit. If they are in the Work, they will know that this is a positive emotion, sent by God via the Higher Emotional Centre, to encourage them and console them.

It is the love of God made manifest to our limited perception.

And the only way to know that love is bear our cross - courageously and yes, even joyously.

Above all, keep in mind the words of Thomas a Kempis:

"Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God's sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God".

Identification

Identification is a kind of glue that joins us to something without our knowledge. It keeps us asleep. It is very dangerous, because it can ruin your own life and the lives of others by keeping you blind to important facts.

What you identify with depends on what kind of person you are. An emotional person may get identified with an emotional issue - a love affair, perhaps, or a family member, or a pet. An intellectual type will be likely to identify with a theory, a set of beliefs, an opinion. A moving centre person often identifies with something connected to their own body, perhaps their appetite or their . feeling of discomfort during an illness; they may also identify with political figures who they think may be able to bring about a change they believe is necessary.

Yet anyone can be identified with anything at all! It depends on how asleep you are, and what catches your interest.

In life, we're encouraged by the mass media to become identified with our False Personality I's, our feelings of anxiety, petty worries, vanity and the wish to put a good spin on things. By doing so, advertisers can get us to buy products that promise to solve these non-existent "problems", while politicians can keep us hypnotized with lies and deception so that we don't question the prevailing system and its injustices.

Very often people identify with some major event in their lives and go to sleep for months, even years. Dr Nicoll told one student that she had fallen asleep on her birthday - six months previously! - and had only just woken up.

Identification is the main cause of failure to make progress in the Work, and it's the state in which the majority of people live for much of the time. That is why the world has so many problems.

If you can discover what you yourself are identified with, it will give a tremendous boost to your personal work on yourself. It will provide you with valuable material to work on, and show you the way forward in your progress towards greater consciousness.

Pause for a moment now, and ask yourself: with what do I identify?

Perhaps it's your work. Perhaps you are in a competitive environment and are pressured to produce more results, climb higher up the promotional ladder. If someone were to point this out to you, you would react strongly against the idea, but let your boss make a mild criticism of your efforts one day and you feel threatened, panicky, as though your very existence is being called into question.

Perhaps it's a family member and his or her problems. Often this is true of codependent people in a family where there's addiction or alcoholism. We concentrate on this problem to the exclusion of other matters, but our very identification prevents us from acting effectively towards this person. It also keeps us from seeing our own illness, that of codependence, and thus from doing anything about it.

Many people identify with their bodies, with their state of health. The shelves of bookstores and libraries everywhere, not to mention the internet, are full of information about mental and physical health problems, some of it useful, much of it not. People become preoccupied with the best way to improve this or that aspect of their health, and devote so much time and money to it that they become hypochondriacs or valetudinarians, like Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen's "Emma". 

Sometimes it's something they've produced - a painting, a piece of writing, a roast dinner, a blog. I mention the latter because I'm writing one, and because, as a professional writer, I started out by being very identified with everything I wrote. I wanted it to be perfect, and the only cure was to work for a large, daily newspaper where each story or column I wrote would be snatched up by editors eager to meet deadlines. Perfect or not - and it never was, of course - off my story would go, and I had to give up any hope of controlling what happened to it. 

If you are identified with something, a sure giveaway is how you react to criticism. 

As a writer, I used to think of my stories as my "babies", so that when they were criticized or questioned I would feel my children were being threatened. This was an extremely difficult state to be in, of course, and I soon adopted the only professional attitude possible if one is to survive in the marketplace - I let go of what I'd written, wished it well, as it were, and turned my attention to something else.

Instead of feeling my stories were my babies, or even a part of myself, I began to see them as something I'd produced, which could be worked on further or let go. And once a story, an article, an essay or a book had "left home", it become impersonal. Yes, I'd written it, but in releasing it to an audience it was no longer my private property and I no longer felt my very existence was threatened if someone didn't happen to like it. I soon discovered this was the attitude of most professional writers and artists; it has to be, if we're to carry on creating. Otherwise, it's just too painful.

You may be identified with one thing or with many. Some people identify with every passing event, every interest. 

Identification is at the root of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Carried to an extreme, OCD prevents people from living full lives because they become identified with one portion of it to the exclusion of almost everything else. Thus, for example, someone identified with hygiene may feel compelled to wash their hands fifty times a day. Someone identified with food may follow a strict - and near-anorexic - diet, or go to the other extreme and insist on only the most "gourmet" morsels entering their mouths. They may spend hours searching for the perfect wine to accompany their meal, or the perfect Middle Eastern spice to complete their signature dinner party dish. They have made a god of their belly, as the Bible puts it.

Do you want to know what you are identified with? Look for what offends you. When did you last take offence about something that somebody said or did? What was the context?

One person I knew took offence when I mistakenly thought he was out of work and living on benefits. Since many alcoholics and addicts do lose their jobs, and have to accept benefits from the State in the early weeks and even months of their recovery, I could not see any reason for him to take offence. It is often a perfectly normal, sensible, thing to do in the circumstances. This man seemed to have no visible means of support and did not go to work each day, but he became furious at my mistaken assumption that he was living on benefits! He reacted far out of proportion to my mistake, and even when I apologized he bridled and pursed his lips; I don't think he ever forgave me.

It turned out he was living on an insurance payout that he had been awarded when he was the victim of a car accident. It was his vanity that had been offended - he was identified with his public image, and wanted to be seen as a man of means rather than a person who was temporarily out of work. A huge False Personality "hot air pie" was the cause of his identification!

Another person became offended when a friend thought she had been "dumped" by a boyfriend. Oh no, the offended party insisted, it was she who had done the dumping! She could not bear to have anyone think she had been rejected, so great was her vanity. She would rather be seen as cruel than abandoned. Again, a massive False Personality attitude was at the root of her offended feelings.

What offends you? When did you last feel you were - quite justifiably, of course - outraged? Can you see what lies behind the feeling of outrage, or insult, that you experience now when you think of it? What aspect of your existence is being questioned? What I's in False Personality are conspiring to drive this feeling?

It might be something as minor as having to wait for a long time in a supermarket queue, a feeling of "it isn't fair", or "why does it have to happen to me, of all people". Or it could be that you felt left out in a group discussion, or failed to be recognized in the street by a passing acquaintance. Any minor incident can lead to a feeling of being offended. And this feeling is the clue that we are identified with something or other.

What would happen if you gave it up?  

A good Work exercise, especially for Lent when we are looking for things to sacrifice, is to give up being offended. Try it for one day; then a week; then two. If you are so free of False Personality that nothing at all offends you, you are either very fortunate or you have worked hard on disidentifying from vanity. Or you are deceiving yourself.

Either way, seeing what you identify with is a great step forward on your spiritual path, and you may be amazed to see how much of your life has been lived in that state. 

Adult ADHD - An Often Overlooked Condition

When you see the abbreviation ADHD, what comes to mind?

A hyperactive child? A disruptive, overactive little boy or girl, who's probably going to need Ritalin? Or just a naughty little kid who needs more discipline at home (a commonly held misunderstanding)?

Chances are you thought of one or all of the above. The common perception of ADD or ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder, sometimes with hyperactivity) is that it applies only to children, and they are always physically restless, often disruptive in class, lack concentration and need medications or stricter home discipline. The latter, by the way, is totally inappropriate, since children with this condition need help with building skills, not punishment for something they didn't choose to do.

 Children with this condition are often restless, but they are not always disruptive, and their state has  nothing to do with "being naughty".

What's more, it's now increasingly diagnosed among adults. You, or someone you know, may have this condition without ever having been aware of it - yet it may have had profound effects on your life.

In this post, I want to look at Adult ADHD.

How can tell whether you have it?

Signs and symptoms include having trouble concentrating and staying focused. You may be someone who's easily distracted by minor stimuli, quickly move from one activity to another, who becomes easily bored and dislikes intellectual work that requires sustained focus, or directed attention, as it's called in the Work. If you are, in fact, in the Work, a perceptive teacher would set you tasks to help develop your Intellectual Center, but this alone may not be enough.

Perhaps you struggle to complete tasks? You may enjoy starting new projects, but have problems following through. You may easily lose track of time and fail to meet deadlines. You feel badly about this, but finishing tasks is a recurring problem for you, though you don't understand why.

You may be forgetful and disorganized. This is not, for you, a matter of lacking will-power. You actually find it really difficult to remember important dates and times, and you may miss appointments.

Your home or work environment quickly becomes messy and cluttered, with dirty cups and dishes, piles of paper, and unread mail stacking up on the table. Because all this is hard to clean, your home or workplace may actually become dirty. It all seems an impossible task to clear up, so you never begin.

You may be impulsive - frequently blurting out thoughts and feelings that are rude and inappropriate towards others. You may have poor self-control, and may also have addictive tendencies.

Other signs that are often taken for another problem include mood swings, irritability, short temper with explosive outbursts, hypersensitivity to criticism and low self-esteem.

The restlessness so often accompanying this disorder in children may, in adults, be expressed as a mental restlessness rather than a physical state. You may have racing thoughts, be easily bored, crave excitement and talk excessively. 

In attempt to overcome this restlessness, some adults develop a tendency to hyperfocus, or obsess about one or two things to the exclusion of others. This coping mechanism may help them to complete a task, but it often causes relationship problems when those around you cannot understand why you keep focusing on some minor detail which, to them, is irrelevant. Or they may resent the time you spend reading or at the computer, when you find something that absorbs your attention and brings some relief from your wandering thoughts.

You could have all of these symptoms, or just a few. Only a trained professional can make a diagnosis and ensure you get appropriate help, but it's worth considering whether you may have Adult ADHD if any of the above descriptions ring a bell.

And it's not all bad news.

Someone with this condition will often be a creative thinker, and when they learn to channel the flow of ideas and calm their racing thoughts they may have much to offer the world and themselves.

It's relatively easy these days to get help for this condition. Usually, this will include counselling - especially involving behavioural and cognitive work - together with practicing organizational skills and developing systems to keep you focused on daily tasks and setting up useful routines. Sometimes medication is hepful, but that is a very individual decision which is best be taken in consultation with a psychiatrist trained in this field. Not everyone needs it; in fact, most manage very well without it.

Let me illustrate this condition by describing someone I know well, who was diagnosed with Adult ADHD; she's the daughter of a friend, and I've known her since she was a baby. I'll call her Ruth.

At school, Ruth was recognized early on as being exceptionally intelligent. She passed tests with ease and often came top of her class, but her desk was the most messy in the room and the work she handed in was frequently missing pages or was stained with tea or coffee. Her handwriting was very hard to read, so she used a word processor whenever possible.

At home, her room was described by her parents as "a complete tip". Toys, clothes, books and school papers were strewn all over the floor. Every time her mother made an attempt to tidy up, the effect was lost within a day or two. In the end, the rest of her family gave up the effort - but the room had to be cleaned for health and hygiene reasons, and this was a frustrating process for everyone, often ending in tears.

Eventually, when Ruth was ten years old, a wise and perceptive teacher spotted what seemed to her the signs of a newly discovered condition, then described as a form of learning disability: Attention Deficit Disorder. In Ruth's case, she had no problem paying attention to theories and facts in the classroom, which was why she was always top in most subjects. But she simply could not organize her work or her desk! Nor could she organize her room at home.

Ruth was emphatically not a "naughty" child, whatever that may mean. She had a real problem for which she was not responsible and which threatened to overwhelm her, and she needed help.

Her teacher took time every day to help Ruth organize her books and folders. She suggested to her parents that their daughter could benefit from seeing a child psychologist, and he did indeed offer her extra help in the form of a support group, counselling and more training in organization skills. No medication was needed, to everyone's relief.

Ruth eventually won a scholarship to an American Ivy League University, where she did outstandingly well in humanities and in sciences, an unusual combination. After graduate school she took a series of jobs which offered her the chance to use both her reasoning skills and her creativity, and today she holds down an important position in an international company. She finds her job fulfilling and rewarding==, and her home life is also happy, except for the fact that she could never quite take to organizing and cleaning her house! Fortunately, she has an understanding spouse, and can afford to employ a cleaner.

I'm interested in this condition because I believe a relatively large number of people struggle with it, and are undiagnosed.

Of course, any of the symptoms I've mentioned could point to another condition. To get the right diagnosis it's essential to consult a specialist. But, if you're someone who experiences problems with impulsivity, organization, focusing, mood swings or obsessional thinking, it would be well worth finding out whether you might have Adult ADHD.

Everyone has some of these problems, some of the time. You may have Adult ADHD if you suffer from more than one, and if they cause you real problems in your daily life.

As well as individual counselling and group support, there is much you can do to improve your own
condition.

It's very important that you ensure you have a nourishing and healthy diet, for example. You need a wide variety of nutrients, many of which can improve your mood, and you should avoid sugar, because it will exacerbate your problems. Plenty of whole grains, fruit and vegetables are essential and will help improve your mood.

Getting enough sleep, organizing your environment, and taking sufficient exercise are important for everyone, but especially for someone with ADHD. You may benefit by employing a cleaner to help with your home space.

Work on your relationships in order to improve your mood and increase your support network. Try not to take offence easily, and don't be over-sensitive to well-meant criticism. Most people want to help you when they understand your problems: let them. They may not understand that you have a specific condition, so explain to your friends that you have been diagnosed with Adult ADHD, and tell them that you need their support to help deal with it.

Learn meditation to calm your racing thoughts. Your spiritual connection is extremely important, reminding you not to become immersed in the daily problems you face. If you are in the Work, the morning exercise is the best way to become calmer, and you may practice short periods of "sitting" and sensing your body during the day whenever you find yourself becoming anxious.

You may be surprised to discover how much better you feel when you've learned how to cope with this condition. Like Ruth, you can then harness all your creative energy and use it for your own benefit and that of those around you.