Patterns of Spirituality

Change in the modern Western Mind

A big change came over the western mind last century. For hundreds of years a person found meaning in life by belonging to some social, religious, or political group. All his values came from other people. Then halfway through last century, the need to find and follow individual values took root. This involved some separation from group values. This separation varied between people. For some people the change was not deep, and so they adjusted quickly, usually by finding a suitable compromise between social and individual values. This compromise only involved reforming a few values; nothing radical was really involved. For other people, the change was deep, and such people were catapulted into a long search for new values and for meaning in life. This deep change gave rise to the birth of a new kind of spirituality in the west, though it often contained elements from the traditional religious beliefs.

The deeper the change that the person is going through, the longer it will take to find what values really suit him, and so the journey of personal change and self-development is a long one. This kind of deep change is not about reforming values; it is about changing them. The only effective way of doing this is to be willing to discard as much of our system of values as we can. We have to get rid of the old before we can find the new. Unfortunately, this is a very distressing experience for many people. All, or nearly all, the values that we relied on in the past no longer make much sense to us ; we just give them lip-service so that we can continue to function reasonably well in society in our need to earn a living and survive. In our darkest days, the only thing that matters is to survive. We just go through the motions of working in our job till we can get home and relax as best we can for the rest of the day.

We go through cycles in our life, and this includes the cycle between darkest days and better days. During these dark times sometimes all we can do is work and sleep, since it is often very difficult to get up enough energy to do some reading, walking, or anything else we normally do for relaxation or learning. We have to "tough it out " till the current cycle of darkness reaches its end (at least temporarily) and things get easier for a while. So you will go through alternations of dark and better days whilst you are on your journey of discovering new values. If you can do some reading on psychology, sociology, autobiographies, self-development issues, and modern history during the easier times, then each unpleasant cycle gets easier to handle. During our dark days, when all we can do is to survive by working and sleeping, what we are really doing is learning to strengthen our will against distress and ill-fortune and all the other negative vicissitudes of life. In effect, our programme becomes one of strengthening our will during the dark days and studying and learning during the easier days.

Overall, the issues that are changing and confronting you dance around in your subconscious mind and take their turn in becoming the current issue that is distressing you. So your diagnosis of what is troubling you is likely to change now and then. Whatever you feel is the current correct diagnosis, go with that and use it as a spur to learn about yourself relative to that diagnosis. Then when the current issue in your subconscious mind changes and you need to change the diagnosis, learn about the new aspect of how you see yourself. This way, you channel your motivation into what you need to study, or, to put this another way, even during times when you feel no energy for study, you can still sometimes manage to study if you feel that it will help you scramble out of the darkness.

What I suggest most strongly is that you keep a journal of your feelings and thoughts, no matter how negative they seem to you. Writing is itself a therapeutic experience, and additionally you can use your notebooks as a source of ideas when later in life you may consider writing about your experiences for the benefit of other readers. The main tool for understanding what we are going through is our intuition, and this functions most easily when we are writing.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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