Why is it that despite our best efforts, many of us remain fundamentally unhappy and unfulfilled in our lives? In this provocative and inspiring book, David Richo distills thirty years of experience as a therapist to explain the underlying roots of unhappiness—and the surprising secret to finding freedom and fulfillment.
There are certain facts of life that we cannot change—the unavoidable “givens” of human existence: (1) everything changes and ends, (2) things do not always go according to plan, (3) life is not always fair, (4) pain is a part of life, and (5) people are not loving and loyal all the time. Richo shows us that by dropping our deep-seated resistance to these givens, we can find liberation and discover the true richness that life has to offer. Blending Western psychology and Eastern spirituality, including practical exercises, Richo shows us how to open up to our lives—including to what is frightening, painful, or disappointing—and discover our greatest gifts.
David Richo, PhD, is a therapist and author who leads popular workshops on personal and spiritual growth.
He received his BA in psychology from Saint John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, in 1962, his MA in counseling psychology from Fairfield University in 1969, and his PhD in clinical psychology from Sierra University in 1984. Since 1976, Richo has been a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor in California. In addition to practicing psychotherapy, Richo teaches courses at Santa Barbara City College and the University of California Berkeley at Berkeley, and has taught at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. He is a clinical supervisor for the Community Counseling Center in Santa Barbara, California.
Who is behind the mask that we have learnt to wear in order to survive and function in the world? Who are we really, behind familial and social conditioning? If we are free from fear and the preoccupations that in the name of survival justify adaptation? Is it possible to be spontaneous and authentic, or is it just an infantile desire to leave behind us along with our dreams?
This book tackles these themes and offers understanding and techniques for recognising our authentic Self, helping us to realise that behind the personality mask there is a mysterious universe, an ocean of potentiality, and that that is our true nature. Then the phrase “know yourself” will no longer just be an indication of philosophers and mystics, but will offer us the concrete possibility to ask the right questions, those that enable us to lift the veil that hides our true face and find peace and fulfillment.
Avikal is a spiritual teacher. Curiosity, passion and love for the truth guide his teaching and are transmitted in a clear and focused way. He is the founder and director of the Integral Being Institute active in Europe, Asia and Australia. Avikal traveled extensively around the globe in his youth working as an anthropologist and a free-lance photographer.
His love for Martial Arts took him to teaching Aikido and Sword, while his love for the body produced diplomas and professional activity in different healing techniques.
From 1989 to 1994 he was the director of the Osho School for Centering and Zen Martial Arts in Pune, India, in the commune of the Indian mystic Osho.
Being involved with Zen and Advaita for more than 25 years, he now leads retreats such as Satori and The Awareness Intensive where the direct experience of True Nature is searched through the question Who am I?.
Since 1997 he has developed an innovative and original approach to the work with the Inner Judge and he is a well known teacher of Essence and Ennegram.
He is also a Life-coach, Management Trainer and Executives Mentor working with presence, leadership, resilience and conflict resolution in Italy and Australia.
He is the author of: “Freedom to Be Yourself. Mastering the Inner Judge”, Sydney 2007 and “Without a Mask Discovering your Authentic Self”, .London 2011
The richest of the world’s richest just got richer. In the last year, the world’s billionaires added $800 billion dollars to their wealth. According to the latest issue of Forbes, when all the money is counted, the 1,426 billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion. That means the average billionaire is worth about $3.8 billion. Of those billionaires in the U.S. — 442 of them — the average net worth is about $4.2 billion.
That’s a lot of money. A whole lot.
Now I’m no wealth redistributionist, but it is appalling to me that some people in our world have so much while others have so little that they struggle to survive. Thankfully, some of the world’s richest — like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — are using significant portions of their wealth to make a difference. But let me show you what might be possible to achieve if all of the world’s billionaires directed even a small percentage of their total wealth to lift the world’s poorest people out of poverty.
Rich governments give much of the money that goes to the world’s poor. So how does international aid compare to the wealth of the world’s billionaires? According to the OECD, the total amount of aid given by the wealthy nations of the world to the developing countries was $156.4 billion in 2011. That’s only 3 percent of the total wealth of the world’s billionaires. In other words, billionaires could double the total amount of foreign assistance to the poor with a sacrifice of just 3 percent of their wealth.
Let’s look at it another way. There are 1.1 billion people without access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization, and as a result 1.6 million people die of cholera and other diarrheal diseases every year.
World Vision provides clean drinking water to about 1 million people every year, and we do it for a rough average of $50 per person, depending on the country and other factors. Theoretically, for about $50 billion clean water could be brought to every person on the planet thereby saving 1.6 million lives every year. That would cost just one percent of their total wealth.
Let’s see what we can do about hunger. Lack of nutrition contributes to the deaths of 2.6 million school children. The World Food Program estimates that $3.2 billion is all it would take to make sure children stay alive and grow up fully nourished. For less than six hundredths of a percent of the wealth of the world’s billionaires we could end childhood deaths from hunger — saving 4.2 million lives.
I’m not suggesting that money alone will solve these problems. The root causes of poverty are complex and require complex solutions. And I’m certainly not suggesting we should redistribute wealth from people who have worked hard. I’m trying to show that tackling some of the most devastating dimensions of global poverty is totally doable. And if 1,426 billionaires could do it, think what could be done if all of us did our fair share.
The world has the technical solutions and field-tested programs that make this possible. Advances in health, agriculture, microfinance, education and technology have given the world the tools needed to change the game. The problem, simply put, is that we have chosen not to invest the money.
But it’s too easy to say that the billionaires should do it. The census bureau reports that in 2011 American households were worth a combined $40.2 trillion dollars. American Christians who attend church at least twice a month earn more than $2.5 trillion annually. Providing clean water for the world would cost about one-tenth of one percent of the wealth of Americans or 2 percent of the income of church-going Christians. We all — you and me — can do this.
It is appalling that some people hold on to billions of dollars while others starve to death without food or die of an illness passed on from dirty river water. But isn’t it also appalling that we hang on to retirement accounts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, while children die of hunger? Isn’t it also appalling that we spend $4 every morning for a latte but won’t spend a dollar a day to sponsor a child in poverty? If I were filling out the death certificates for the almost 20,000 children who die every day of preventable causes, I would write one word: APATHY
Here’s the problem: whether we are billionaires or just ordinary people, we tend to think that saving the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children is somebody else’s job — not ours. And until that changes, children will continue to die.
Richard Stearns currently serves as the President of World Vision U.S. Since the beginning of his presidency in 1998, Stearns has built a strong leadership team focused on bringing corporate best practices to the non-profit sector. Donations tripled during his first decade as president, making World Vision U.S. a billion-dollar organization.
Rich Stearns on making poverty personal
Rich Stearns, CEO of World Vision tells a story about a trip to India and encountering a mom with a little boy. This is from the book – The Hole in Our Gospel – and the study – The Gospel Quest – http://www.thegospelquest.com
Adyashanti, author of Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
Claude AnShin Thomas served in the Vietnam War from 1966-67. In 1995 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk and currently speaks in religious and secular communities about cultures of violence and how they can become transformed. He visits war-torn countries, places of past and current suffering, hospitals, schools, and prisons. He facilitates mindfulness meditation retreats, long distance pilgrimages, street retreats and practice days in former concentration camps. He is also the founder of the Zaltho Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization that promotes nonviolence and transformation and the author of At Hell’s Gate — A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace.
Being In the World Without Misery – Part 1B (03-20-2013)
Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period. Can you address this subject?
The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.
You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.
The Roots of Human Insanity and How Spirituality can make us Sane: Originally published in Green Spirit, Winter 2007
To an impartial observer – say, an alien zoologist from another planet – there must be very compelling evidence that human beings suffer from a serious mental disorder, and are perhaps even insane.
The last few thousand years have been an endless catalogue of insane behaviour. Recorded history is an endless catalogue of wars, and the story of the brutal oppression of the great mass of human beings by a tiny privileged minority. The terrible oppression of women which runs through history – and which still exists in many parts of the world – is another sign of this insanity, as is the hostile, repressive attitude to sex and the body which most cultures have shared.
In addition to this insane collective behaviour, an alien zoologist might see signs of mental disorder in the way that many of us behave as individuals. He or she would be puzzled by the fact that human beings seems to find it so difficult to be happy. Why do so many people suffer from different kinds of psychological malaise – for example, depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation – or else spend so much time oppressed by anxieties, worries and feelings of guilt or regret, and negative emotions like jealousy and bitterness? And why do so many people seem to have an insatiable lust to possess things? Why are we prepared to go to such lengths to obtain material goods which we don’t actually need and which bring no real benefits to us?
In the same way, many people have a very strong craving for status and success; they dream of being famous pop or TV stars, and try to gain respect from others by wearing particular clothes, possessing status symbols or going to certain places or behaving in a certain way. ‘Why aren’t human beings content just to be as they are?’ the observer might ask himself. ‘Why are they so driven to gain wealth and status instead of accepting their situation and living in the present moment?’
Primal and Prehistoric Peoples
However, there are many groups of people in the world who don’t seem to be touched by this insanity – or at least, who weren’t until recent times. ‘Primal’ peoples like the Australian Aborigines, the tribal peoples of Siberia, Lapland, Oceania and other isolated areas, generally had a very low level of warfare, if any at all. They also have high status for women, and are strikingly egalitarian and democratic. Almost uniformly, anthropologists have been struck by how naturally content and carefree these peoples seem, as if they are free of the psychological malaise which afflicts us.
Even more strikingly, archaeological records indicate that prehistoric human beings were free from this insanity too. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found almost no evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history – that is, right from the beginnings of the human race until 8000 BCE. Archaeologists have discovered over 300 prehistoric caves around the world, dating from 40,000 to 10,000 BCE, not one of which contains any images of weapons or fighting.
Prehistoric peoples have no signs of male domination either. On the contrary, they seem to have worshipped the female form. Their major art form was small statuettes of naked women, often with exaggerated breasts and hips. Literally tens of thousands of these have been found across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These societies apparently had no different classes or castes either. For archaeologists, one of the most obvious signs of inequality are grave differences. Later societies have larger, more central graves for more ‘important’ people, which also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more ‘important’ graves than women. But the graves of prehistoric peoples are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no wealth.
The Over-Developed Ego
This suggests that there is a fundamental difference between us and primal or prehistoric peoples, a difference which gives rise to the collective and individual insanity which plagues us. Why should they be free of the insanity of warfare, oppression and materialism? I believe that this fundamental difference is what might be described as our ‘over-developed ego.’
We appear to have a more pronounced sense of individuality – or ego – than primal peoples. According to the anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, for example, the essential characteristic of primal peoples was their less ‘sharpened’ sense of individuality. In his words, ‘the limits of their individuality are variable and ill-defined.’ He notes that, rather than existing as self-sufficient individual entities – as we experience ourselves – their sense of identity is bound up with their community and their land. He cites reports of peoples who use the word ‘I’ when speaking of their group and others who see their land as an extension of their self, so that being forced away from their land would be tantamount to death. (This is why primal peoples are often prepared to commit suicide rather than leave their lands.)
The naming practices of certain peoples suggest this too. For us, a name is a permanent label which defines our individuality and autonomy. But Australian Aborigines, for example, do not have fixed names which they keep throughout their lives. Their names regularly change, and include those of other members of their tribe. Other native peoples use tekonyms – terms which describe the relationship between two people – instead of personal or kinship names. On the other hand, our sense of ego is so defined and strong that many of us experience a basic sense of separation to nature, other human beings and even our own bodies. We are self-sufficient individuals who can exist apart from the natural world, our communities and even each other.
I believe this over-developed ego is the fundamental madness from which we suffer from, and the root cause of our insane behaviour. Intense ego-consciousness is a state of suffering. It brings a basic sense of isolation, of being separate from other people and the rest of reality. We experience ourselves as fragile entities trapped inside our own heads with the rest of the world ‘out there,’ on the other side. And our egos send a constant stream of ‘thought-chatter’ through our minds, a chaos of memories, daydreams, worries and fears which disturbs our being and creates a constant state of anxiety.
In addition, because we live in our thoughts so much, we find it very difficult to live in the present, and to appreciate the reality and beauty of the world in which we live. The world becomes a dreary, half-real place, perceived through a fog of thought. As a result of this, most people feel a basic sense of incompleteness and discontent. And this negative state is the basic source of the cravings for possessions and power and status, which are a way of trying to complete ourselves and compensate for our inner discord. We try to complete ourselves – and make ourselves significant – by gaining power over other people or by collecting wealth and possessions.
And in turn, this desire for wealth and power is at the heart of warfare and oppression. But just as importantly, our strong sense of ego means that it’s difficult for us to empathise with other people. We become ‘walled off’ from them, unable to ‘feel with’ them and to experience the world from their perspective or to sense the suffering we might be causing them. We become able to oppress and exploit other people in the service of our own desires.
Perhaps the desire for wealth and power, minus the ability to empathise, is the root of warfare and the oppression of women and other social groups. Maybe it’s also the root cause of our abuse of the environment. It means that we experience a sense of ‘otherness’ to nature, and that we can’t sense its aliveness, and as a result we don’t feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.
Beyond the Ego
However, there is a method of healing our inner discord and transcending our insanity: through ‘transpersonal’ – or spiritual – development. The whole purpose of transpersonal development is to transcend our intensified sense of ego, to blunt its walls of separateness and quieten its chaotic thought-chatter so that we can begin to experience a new sense of inner content and a new sense of connection to the cosmos and to other beings.
This is what the practice of meditation aims to do: to generate a state of inner quietness in which the ego fades away. And this is what happens when we dedicate our lives to serving others rather than following our own selfish desires: separateness begins to fall away as we develop a heightened sense of compassion, a shared sense of being with other people and other creatures.
As we transcend the intensified sense of ego, we begin to see the world as a meaningful and harmonious place. We become able to live in the moment and accept ourselves and our lives as they are, without wanting. And we also move beyond the social insanity of warfare and oppression. Since there is no discord inside us, we no longer crave for wealth and power, and now that we are no longer separate, we have the ability to empathise with other beings, and so become incapable of abusing or exploiting them. When the ego is transcended, all of the madness of human behaviour fades away, like the symptoms of a disease which has now been cured. That is the only true sanity, and perhaps the only way in which we can hope to live in peace and harmony on this planet.
T.S. Eliot’s deep interest in Indian philosophical systems has long been acknowledged, but surprisingly little exploration of their influence on his poetry and drama has been undertaken. In T.S. Eliot, Vedanta, and Buddhism, Sri juxtaposes the essential perceptions of Indian thought with Eliot’s work to illuminate his vision of the human condition.
Years after his Harvard studies in Sanskrit and philosophy and his decision not to embrace the subject in the conventional academic sense, Eliot explained that his ‘only hope of penetrating to the heart of the mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European.’ But, though he was committed to Christian doctrine and an ‘occidental personality,’ Eliot realized that his poetry showed the influence of Indian thought and sensibility.
Sri notes all the direct references to the Hindu and Buddhist texts from The Waste Land and Four Quartets through The Cocktail Party, but his main concern is to show Eliot’s implicit fusion of Indian philosophical themes and symbols with the Western worldview in an organic whole. This work highlights another dimension of his search for a unifying principle in the universe.
About the Author P.S. Sri is an associate professor in the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Royal Roads Military College.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Impermanence and Suffering
2. The Wheel
3. Craving and Maya
4. The Still Point
Conclusion
Click here to review Upanishadic Perceptions in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Drama by P.S. Sri
Royal Military College of Canada
In The Greatness of Saturn experience directly the healing power of one of the world’s greatest myths.
The telling of mythic stories has always been a powerful form of therapy, bring healing to people facing adversity. The Greatness of Saturn is such a therapeutic myth, told and retold through many centuries. Taken from the Vedic tradition, it honors the planet Saturn, who personifies time, limitation, loss, and all forms of adversity.
No person goes through life without sometime being touched by Saturn. This book presents a classic Saturn story and a clear view of the cosmology from which the story came. As we hear the story and come to understand its context, we experience a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
Dr. Robert E. Svoboda
Robert E. Svoboda is the first Westerner ever to graduate from a college of Ayurveda (in 1980) and be licensed to practice Ayurveda in India. During and after his formal Ayurvedic training, his mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, tutored him in Ayurveda, Yoga, Jyotish, Tantra and other forms of classical Indian lore. After moving to India in 1973, he lived there for more than a decade. Since 1985 he has traveled the world lecturing, consulting, teaching and writing. The author of more than a dozen books and audio works, he has served as Adjunct Faculty at the Ayurvedic Institute, Albuquerque, NM, and Bastyr University, Kenmore, WA. To read more about Dr. Svoboda and his travels, visit his website http://www.drsvoboda.com.
Why is it that despite our best efforts, many of us remain fundamentally unhappy and unfulfilled in our lives? In this provocative and inspiring book, David Richo distills thirty years of experience as a therapist to explain the underlying roots of unhappiness—and the surprising secret to finding freedom and fulfillment. 
David Richo, PhD, is a therapist and author who leads popular workshops on personal and spiritual growth.
Who is behind the mask that we have learnt to wear in order to survive and function in the world? Who are we really, behind familial and social conditioning? If we are free from fear and the preoccupations that in the name of survival justify adaptation? Is it possible to be spontaneous and authentic, or is it just an infantile desire to leave behind us along with our dreams? 
Richard Stearns currently serves as the President of World Vision U.S. Since the beginning of his presidency in 1998, Stearns has built a strong leadership team focused on bringing corporate best practices to the non-profit sector. Donations tripled during his first decade as president, making World Vision U.S. a billion-dollar organization.
The Roots of Human Insanity and How Spirituality can make us Sane: Originally published in Green Spirit, Winter 2007 
T.S. Eliot’s deep interest in Indian philosophical systems has long been acknowledged, but surprisingly little exploration of their influence on his poetry and drama has been undertaken. In T.S. Eliot, Vedanta, and Buddhism, Sri juxtaposes the essential perceptions of Indian thought with Eliot’s work to illuminate his vision of the human condition.
In The Greatness of Saturn experience directly the healing power of one of the world’s greatest myths.
