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BENEFITS
Humans are deeply subjective creatures who experience many mind-boggling
difficulties because we are enchanted, metaphysical souls inhabiting
finite and often frustrated mammal bodies. As Jesus taught his
disciples, few of us learn how to manage our creature-self paradox --
flesh and spirit, in ways that empower our souls and bring us
self-transcending liberation. In
THE LIBERATED SOUL, you can
learn powerful concepts from many psychospiritual giants, complete
self-focus exercises and master major projects to discover why life
is beset with horrors; much anxiety, self-deception, depression,
alienation and rage. Better yet, you shall learn how to manage the
excessive repression, avoidance and denial that
develops within anxious or existentially frustrated souls, leading to
serious emotional complications that keep people in bondage, because
of our embattled psychological and spiritual traits.
You can learn how to -- exorcise many anxieties from your life, avoid keeping
deadly, debilitating secrets from simmering within and win your
soul's liberation. If you or a loved one finds it difficult to
live a joyous life, feeling defeated, depressed and frustrated
because of life's pressures, unable to maintain peaceful, love-filled
relationships in a satisfying life-style, this course teaches you
many powerful attitudes, activities and relationships needed to make
life deeply meaningful.
DeVille researched and developed
THE LIBERATED SOUL
for thoughtful women and men who seek
psychospiritual freedom for themselves, their families, congregations
and their communities. Through this existential or life-style
approach to soul liberation, the author teaches women and men they
are first and foremost spiritual beings for whom a secular,
nihilistic, narcissistic life-style is invariably self-defeating. He
reports on the best ways of making life come out right through
spiritually mature, self-aware choices.
This course of study isn't simplistic;
it isn't something hurriedly cobbled together, and obviously, living
well in our era of complexity and relentless change isn't easy. Soul
liberation requires both psychological knowledge and
philosophical wisdom! To begin with, you must understanding
several astonishing spiritual breakthroughs that many of DeVille's outstanding existential
scholars reached consensus about.
FIRST
- THE ATHEIST'S ENIGMA
As an
ancient African-American gospel song laments, life is indeed filled
with complications and sorrows for everyone. Nobody knows the
trouble I've seen -- Nobody knows but Jesus. At times life
can become an unmitigated horror as the world slowly but surely
converts every plant that sprouts and every creature that is born
into fertilizer to feed future doomed generations. We really are
finite beings adrift in a dangerous world, beset consistently by the
tragic human quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death.
George Santayana, the brilliant Harvard philosopher wrote; Life is
neither entertainment nor a feast but a predicament to be resolved in
the face of enormous difficulties. Most of us do indeed live out
at least some portions of our lives in quiet desperation. We are all
caught up in some frustrations of life much of the time.
During a half century of psycho
spiritual research, this consensus emerged in the writings scholars
like Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Laura
Perls, Abraham Maslow Melanie Klein and many others. Some of them
started as agnostics or atheists who like Sigmund Freud thought God
was a security myth, religion a fraud, worship and prayer naively
subjective and faith, hope and love meaningless illusions.
Nevertheless, as they matured personally and professionally, when
everything psychological had been researched, after they'd reached
the limits of psychotherapy, the incredible insights in the following
paragraph appeared regularly in many of the most influential
scholars' lectures, therapy sessions and books.
To
mature beyond neurotic anxiety, to cope with existential
alienation, to live purposefully and win consistent satisfaction,
each person must develop a faith as if God were real. We scholars
can find no God religion probably panders to
human weakness, prayer and worship are frauds, Nevertheless, to
avoid crippling our souls, we must assume that God exists and offer
devotion to this myth because doing so gives us a crucial sense of
security in a dangerous world We can then live with the illusions
of faith, hope and love that is essential for a meaningful lift.
Oh my -- how wondrously droll, how
deeply self-serving, how terribly convoluted! Fortunately, there is a
much better way, for according to William of Occam, with all factors
being equal, the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best
one. Soren Kierkegaard, the always brilliant and forever relevant
godfather of modem psychology, the most equal of DeVille's great
authors, along with Ernest Becker, saw life more clearly than most.
The Danish philosopher of the First Industrial Revolution, when
writing about satisfaction reported;
the only way we humans can
find contentment in a commercial society is through a
self-transcending faith in God that lifts us beyond a fearful,
frustrated and meaningless existence.
SECOND
- THE CONTRITE SPIRIT
The next astonishing consensus to
emerge from DeVille's brilliant psychospiritual giants is the
necessity of personal humility in the deliverance of one's soul. To resolve our spiritual
difficulties, to succeed in our quest for liberation, we must
successfully pass through the major emotional crisis of human
liberation. During this conflict, the soul with its unconscious scar
tissue; repressed, anxious, subjective and frozen at the core of our
being, must surrender itself. Selfishness must yield to
generosity. We must mature beyond the
immature attitude of I Myself Alone. The
seeker after freedom, to use St.
Paul's concepts, must nurture a contrite attitude in order to repent
and abandon much personal selfishness.
In psychoanalytic terms, the self must
sacrifice the ego in order to become free of its tyranny. Only after we
have removed our emotional armor, have matured beyond egoistic
self-deception and often gone past the assistance psychotherapy can give
us to connect consciously with God, can we find deliverance. We have too
many primitive homosapien traits to break free in our own strength. We
need assistance to mature beyond our posturing and pretension, past our
repressed killer-ape paranoia and nagging anxieties, beyond our compulsive
defenses. We must abandon such baggage to escape through the prison bars
we ourselves have erected for ego protection against our anxiety and
guilt.
Our search for freedom via the
repentance of our failures, with sincere contrition, creates several
crucial questions to be answered as we seek liberation from our
homosapien anxiety and rage through faith and self-awareness. We must
ask ourselves;
How can I end my self-defeating ego
defenses, remove my emotional and cultural armor to become the loving
parent, supportive spouse and faithful friend I yearn to be?
How shall I courageously stand in
my quaking and bleeding nakedness
-- my ego screaming for esteem
regardless of who is abused, without being overwhelmed by the
cruelties of life?
How can 1, a mere mortal
already living under a death sentence, in a prison of my own making,
successfully make my way through this confusing maze of suffering,
rage guilt and death that is the universal tragic quartet of
existence?
BENEFITS
1. Each human life is an uneasy
joining of selfish mammalian traits from our primordial past and
generous self-aware virtues through which our creature selves live
reasonably well together.
These dissimilar elements are often in
conflict within the soul and generally in opposition to many cultural
requirements. The reader will learn how we humans combine emotional
and spiritual traits with more or less success.
2. Each person automatically
assumes himself or herself to be at center-stage of life's drama. We
all see I -
MYSELF-ALONE, as the key player to whom all others should
defer, although while growing up with other narcissists, most persons
learn to repress this selfishness somewhat.
The reader will learn how our
narcissistic yearning for possessions, power, prestige and pleasure
creates enormous personal and social problems -- up to and including
the devastating 20th century wars and cold wars.
3. Each of us is given this
marvelous gift of life -- a big red apple for our pleasure. Unfortunately, the gift has a
worm at the core - the tragic quartet of guilt, rage,
suffering and especially death - and with the quartet,
the death-dread that nags at each person, creating such pain that we
repress it in order to find a bit of satisfaction from life.
The reader will learn how our genetic death-dread, our unconscious fear
of annihilation, our ravening creature self, complicates almost every
human attitude, activity and relationship.
4. We can help one another live meaningful lives by being
supportive, but in the last analysis, each person has to make the
crucial decisions that lead to psychospiritual wholeness or to
fragmentation.
Unfortunately, each society conspires with its myths and
self-deceptions to conceal the nature of healing and health. The reader will learn how to better take personal
responsibility for deliverance, in much the same manner as an addict
making healing choices.
5. Although the early psychologists
like Freud had many brilliant insights, we have now learned much more
that can help women and men make life satisfying consistently.
Of
course, everything we think and do takes shape within our brains, our
incredible computer atop our shoulders. The reader will learn how to
apply psychoanalytic concepts in ways that make sense and deliver
souls from captivity today.
6. There is little doubt
that all persons are influenced by persons with more power, wealth or
prestige than they can focus on living wisely and well.
This makes us
vulnerable sexually, financially and spiritually to users and abusers
who care little about others in their quest for personal esteem. The
reader will learn to recognize the motivation of manipulators and to
avoid and deflect them without becoming a lonely soul.
7. Humans are all subjective to the core, living their lives with
the illusions that make our suffering, guilt and death less difficult
to tolerate but also cause many serious problems over the long run.
The reader will learn that others are not necessarily lying as they
see things from a self-serving position, but everything important
must be understood to come from our self-serving subjectivity.
8. Each person must accept
the hidden paradox within, come to grips with the creature-self that
combines both emotional and spiritual traits which remain in conflict
much of the time.
The reader will learn that the orthodox quest, the
sexual quest and the service quest cannot over the 10nK run deliver
one from the shackles forged by our childhood attempts to avoid pain
and to fill our lives with self-esteem.
9. A common mistake made by
many persons is to assume that psychology and religion are
incompatible.
Actually they are sisters under the skin for they both
well up out of the same human needs. The reader will learn how to
avoid either/or choices, to understand how the roots of psychotherapy
and worship are woven together within each human soul.
10. While we have many neurotic traits in our complex and
threatening world, there are several major forms of mental illness.
Each one comes from a failure
of courage that causes the sufferer to miss finding meaning in his or
her life. The reader will learn to better manage the problems found
in schizophrenia, depression, sexual distortions and several other
forms of emotional illness.
11. We all hate to surrender
some aspects of our precious souls in order to connect supportively
with others.
We all yearn for the assurance of a conscious
continuance of the soul that makes death less painful. The reader
will learn how we can mature beyond prestige, pleasure, power and
possessions through faith, hope and love as expressed by supportive
souls we love.
12. We all want to make our
satisfying activities and relationships last as long as possible. To
do this we must mature psychospiritually, selecting key tasks and
relationships to which we commit ourselves.
The reader will learn that the effort spent in living wisely seldom
frustrates us but leads to more and more rewarding attitudes and
activities.
13. Because our homosapien
anxieties and the pressures of a secular society are too great to
manage without a fear of life and a dread of death, we
seek help from many sources including mentors, therapists, ministers
and politicians.
The reader will learn how the ultimate source of assistance is God
from whom every aspect of existences eventually flows.
14. Draw together the major points into a meaningful whole. Lasting
satisfaction through psychospiritual health occurs when we live at
peace with the creature-self within.
This occurs only as we mature
spiritually and transcend narcissism, when we civilize our egos, and
develop a faith in God that creates within our souls the life
enhancing elements of a covenant faith.
Warmly,
Jard & Roberta DeVille
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