At core, I do not differentiate between psychological and spiritual work, or between business, psychology, and spirituality. However, my preference is typically to work as deeply as clients are committed to. Spirituality has been the core of my existence since I was 21 years old, and my motivation for becoming a psychologist was to be admitted to the teacher training in the Diamond Approach. My main sources of inspiration and guidance have been Idries Shah, A. H. Almaas, Oscar Ichazo, Sandra Maitri, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Plato, Georg Hegel, Jean Baudrillard, Hermann Hesse, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ken Wilber, Tarthang Tulku, and Dan Brown.
I feel privileged to guide individuals on their spiritual quest—a most paradoxical journey home, which begins by not traying to go anywhere.
Gems from Idries Shah:
“A man travels in India. The train is very slow, and has just stopped; allegedly for the hundredth time, at a wayside station. The man jumps out of his carriage, runs up to the driver and roars at him: ‘Can’t you move any faster than this?!’ The train driver replies: ‘Of course I can move faster than this—but, you see, unfortunately, I am not allowed to leave the train.’”
“[There] was once a man about who agreed to train a fish who begged him for help to live out of the water, being desperate to take up a life on land. Little by little, a few seconds and then a few minutes, then hours at a time, he managed to get the fish accustomed to the open air. In fact, the fish went to live near him, with its own damp but open-air palace in a flower-bed near in the man’s garden. It was delighted with its new life and often used to say to him: ‘This is what I call a real living!’ Then, one day, there was a very heavy downpour of rain, which flooded the garden, thus drowning the fish”
Jiddu Krishnamurti said this in his talk in the Colosseum (Oslo, Norway) 10th September, 1933:
Let me put this in another way: Though we have experiences, these experiences do not keep us awake, but rather put us to sleep, because our minds and hearts have been trained for generations merely to imitate, to conform. After all, when there is any kind of suffering, we should not look to that suffering to teach us, but rather to keep us fully awake, so that we can meet life with complete awareness not in that semi-conscious state in which almost every human being meets life.
I shall explain this again, so as to make myself clear; for if you understand this you will naturally understand what I am going to say.
I say that life is not a process of learning, accumulating. Life is not a school in which you pass examinations in learning, in learning from experiences, learning from actions, from suffering. Life is meant to be lived, not to be learnt from. If you regard life as something from which you have to learn, you act but superficially. That is, if action, if daily living, is but a means towards a reward, towards an end, then action itself has no value. Now when you have experiences, you say that you must learn from them, understand them. Therefore experience itself has no value to you because you are looking for a gain through suffering, through action, through experience. But to understand action completely, which to me is the ecstasy of life, the ecstasy which is immortality, mind must be free of the idea of acquisition, the idea of learning through experience, through action. Now both mind and heart are caught in this idea of acquisition, this idea that life is a means to something else. But when you see the falseness of that conception, you will no longer treat suffering as a means to an end. Then you no longer take comfort in ideas, in beliefs; you no longer take shelter in standards of thought or feeling; you then begin to be fully aware, not for the purpose of seeing what you can gain from it, but in order intelligently to release action from imitation and from the search for a reward. That is, you see the significance of action, and not merely what profit it will bring you.
Now most minds are caught in the idea of acquisition, the search for a reward. Suffering comes to awaken them to this illusion, to awaken them from their state of semi-consciousness, but not to teach them a lesson. When mind and heart act with a sense of duality, thus creating opposites, there must be conflict and suffering. What happens when you suffer? You seek immediate relief, whether it be in drink or in amusement or in the idea of God. To me, these are all the same, for they are merely avenues of escape that the subtle mind has devised, making of suffering a superficial thing. Therefore I say, become fully aware of your actions, whatever they may be; then you will perceive how your mind is continually finding an escape; you will see that you are not confronting experiences completely, with all your being, but only partially, semi-consciously.
Next to the inner chamber only accessible through deep meditation, or Darkness Retreats, my favorite place on planet Earth is 7132 in Vals. An excellent place to cleans the Doors of Perception.
Tenzin Wangyal (and Dalai Lama) on the Darkness Retreat:
Another superior spiritual swami/sage:
