Bibliotherapy

Not much of a summer we're having here in the Blue Mountains.  My excitement at understanding how beneficial it would be to greet the Sun every morning has been dampened by the very few days we've had of being able to actually see it.

I've been working on my bibliotherapy list.  Working being the operative word.  It is taking longer than I thought.  I am having to revisit these texts and think about them again.  It is in itself a lifetime's work. 

After a couple of years of attending lectures and working on myself, I came to the happy realisation I could walk into a book store like Adyar with a purpose in mind and not emerge completely befuddled as had happened to me in my late teens and early twenties, before I had found a Way.

With a way, I could navigate through a confusing panoply of self-help, 'psycho-spiritual technology' or pscyho-babble by it's more common vernacular and go into Adyar on less frequent occasion and make my way directly to a few sections only.

Books on The Fourth Way,  on Swedenborg, on Tibetan Buddhism, Sacred Texts and Sufi stories.   Being able to see even out of the corner of my eye, that many self-help books with promising sounding titles are trying to hook me by appealing to ideas I may have about myself being wealthy and attractive are pretty well guaranteed to be complete tosh.

Indeed the fringe field is very big and may be described as a type of psycho-spiritual technology.  It has become quite strong and exists in many parts of the world as a multi-million dollar "industry".  It partly depends on the fact that all people have within themselves a homing instinct which seeks to lead them back to the Creative Source of  Life; they feel the stirring of this instinct but do not know the direction in which to move.  Hence they come to rely upon the fringe systems as a means of being guided towards spiritual development.  Strange pursuits such as past-lives therapy to release the soul for spiritual advancement, aura readings, chakra balancing, Camelot power or the effort to develop the siddhis are widely available.

  . . . courses are offered for instruction in these topics and all over the world people flock to them in great numbers with the hope that their lives will be miraculously changed.  Quite often these courses are weekend workshops or seminars lasting for a few weeks.  What people fail to realise is that it has taken half a lifetime to reach the disorganised state in which they find themselves, and it is simply not possible to correct and overcome this state in a few easy lessons.  External aims and external methods cannot change internal disorder.

The Welfare of the Soul Dr Philip Groves.

Someone has transcribed

this small booklet (click on title)

which is now out of print but 

reproduced in  Dr Goves' 

Swedenborg's Mighty Contribution to the Welfare of the Soul.