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Guru Corner Disclaimer: Teachers highlighted in the guru corner are not being recommended or promoted for spiritual guidance. They are merely individuals who exemplify certain spiritual qualities that are placed here for us to observe and use in whatever fashion works best for us. "Viktor Frankl’s wife, father, mother
and brother died in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
Enduring extreme hunger, cold and brutality, first in Auschwitz
then Dachau, Frankl himself was under constant threat of going
to the gas ovens. He lost every physical belonging on his first
day in the camps, and was forced to surrender a scientific manuscript
he considered his life’s work. Man’s Search for Meaning has sold over nine million copies and has been translated into 24 languages. It was voted one of America’s ten most influential books by the Library of Congress. Yet Frankl, who originally wanted the book to be published with only his prisoner number on the cover, states that he does not see the book as a great achievement. Its success is ‘an expression of the misery of our time’, revealing the ravenous hunger for meaningful existence. Frankl’s experiences helped provide the basis for the development of a new school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, following Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology. Whereas psychoanalysis requires a person’s introspection and self-centredness to reveal the basis of their neurosis, logotherapy tries to take the person out of themselves and see their life in a broader perspective. Where psychoanalysis focuses on the ‘will to pleasure’, and Adlerian psychology on the ‘will to power’, logotherapy sees the prime motivating force in human beings to be a will to meaning. In logotherapy, existential distress is not neurosis or mental disease, but a sign that we are becoming more human in the desire for meaning. In contrast to Freud or Adler, Frankl chose not to see life simply as the satisfaction of drives or instincts, or even in becoming ‘well-adjusted’ to society. Instead, he believed that the outstanding feature of human beings is their free will. Frankl says that although we can statistically work out the likelihood of change, self-fulfilment or mental health amongst the population, and draw generalities about the human psyche, we can never predict the behavior of an individual. Humans are human because they live for ideals and values. Aware that most of us would never even come close to such a horrible fate as the gas chambers, Frankl used it as a reference point, a symbol of personal responsibility that could guide the decisions we make in our everyday lives. No matter what the circumstances, his book says, we can be free." - Extract from the book "50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books To Transform Your Life by Tom Butler-Bowdon. Order below:
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Beyond The Dream
"The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it." -- Helen Keller When we imagine utopia, it is a place where suffering does not exist. In fact, most paradises include only beautiful images and pleasant associations. To put suffering in paradise would be to make it purgatory, not heaven. But, in reality, there is value is some suffering because it is through overcoming suffering that our greater Divine qualities shine through. This is an alchemical process where fire is essential. Without placing the elements through the fire, they do not merge and become something greater than what they were. The problem is not so much in the suffering, as in how we are attached to comfort. We align with the belief system that to be comfortable is to be successful. And this is the main reason we suffer. Otherwise, most of Western suffering is really not physical. It is mental and emotional. It is an attachment to a way of life that is slowly disappearing. In the multidimensional world, this life is but one focus in a large set of earthly lives, or if you want to go other-dimensional, an innumerable set other lives. From the viewpoint of essence, you are no better or no worse than any other focus of your existence. Although, one focus, or life, may be spent rotting in a jail cell, another may be receiving an Oscar in Hollywood. From a Divine perspective, neither experience is better or worse -- they are merely choices of experience that add to the whole of who you are. However, when we are personally faced with suffering, we'd rather be the actress nominated for the Oscar, not the political prisoner in a foreign country. And it is in those moments, when we feel most abandoned by the Divine, that we must find the Divine within. So, despite a large shift in consciousness, our world will never fully be a utopia. We will always create experiences that right now we consider negative. The only thing that will change is our perception of these experiences and our automatic responses to being faced with suffering. We will grow out of our need to control every aspect of our lives and steer our ship only to peaceful waters. At times, we may want to land in a storm and it will be all right.
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