Facing the World with Soul [antikvár]

Foreword On this morning of the beginning of my forty-eighth year I begin a series of letters to you, meditations that could be called "Facing the World With Soul." These letters issue from a soul in pain in intimacy with the world in which we live and are addressed to you, dear reader, whose soul may be undergoing similar experiences. Thinking that the suffering I have felt for as long as I can remember arose from some unknown cause sent me in search of healing, beginning with training as a psychologist. Besides having undergone no less than five different kinds of psychotherapy, I have attempted a myriad of other healing techniques from acupuncture to crystal healing to radionics to past life regression to astrological counseling; no need to name the rest. How long it has taken to realize that there is another side to suffering than that felt so personally! How long it has taken to come to the point of seeing that the question of soul pain is not what to do about it but what to do with it. Pain, imperceptible psychic and emotional pain, is the invaluable medium through which the world can be regenerated. What a wondrous mystery we encounter here if this proposition holds even a semblance of truth. I am suggesting that political, social, economic, ecological, and technological programs (and all other imaginable kinds of programs) will not alter the condition of the world one wit; they only rearrange what is already given into new patterns into which we are inserted as onlookers, strangers. If the mentality of programs that attempt to alter the world is impotent because it seeks to do something about rather than with pain, even more impotent are the so-called helping professions that try to do something about inner.