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How to Become a
Truly Authentic Person;
Develop Spiritual Maturity, Emotional
Wellness,
and
Physical Health
TO VIENNA WITH LOVE
IN MEMORIAM
OF VIKTOR FRANKL
This study course is intended
to help you seek faith, hope and love with the
creature-self
who combines our earthy physical attributes and the spiritual
aspects of life. Because Viktor Frankl was my mentor who linked my
work in what I consider a connection with his mentor Sigmund
Freud, and with Soren Kierkegaard before him, I developed an early
interest in the path to psychospiritual freedom. Rather like
THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
and stayed, Viktor became a dear friend after I
had him flown from Vienna to America to teach. I'd booked him for
a number of campus seminars, consultations with local pastors and
psychotherapists and several community lectures when I was
Psychology Professor and Convocations Chairman at Olivet College.
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The
Benefits to You
He quickly won my
respect with his covenant faith in God that had carried him close
to sainthood during three and a half ghastly years in Nazi
Germany's death camps. Viktor had discovered for himself the peace
of mind and spirit found in the following grand old hymn of the
church and more vital to me, had a greater influence on my
spiritual health than anyone except for my parents. God is
pictured here as nurturing each soul who matures beyond the
secular limitations of life.
When
through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace all sufficient shall be thy supply.
The flame shall not slay thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.
My
message of soul liberation is especially appropriate in this era
of incessant anxiety and often confusing challenges -- in this
time of international terrorism, wars and threats of wars,
existential frustration, a collapsing middle class and the present
destruction of American democracy by political abusers.
VIEW
CONTENTS of The Liberated Soul
I
shall always regret that Viktor was too ill during his final years
to critique this my most complete work about existential healing.
His family kindly but firmly held all his admirers at bay.
Obviously Viktor cannot be held accountable for any conclusions
I've reached or mistakes I've made, for with more books published
than he himself wrote, I have made my own way intellectually and
spiritually.
I should
begin by explaining how I perceive the men and women of this
society for whom I write.
Each and
everyone of us is regularly challenged and buffeted by life
itself, slogging through many disappointments and sorrows,
perhaps seeing our career paths vanish and eventually burying
our parents. We have good times also but life has indeed become
days of toil and only hours of ease for virtually every
ambitious person in the 21st century. Most employees
have little job security beyond the next paycheck. Worse,
parents with the brain power of a gnat fear that children
growing up in our secular world could destroy everything they
want for them by just trying narcotics or having a single sexual
encounter with an H I V infected person. Surely we all realize
that life can turn against us, indeed becoming nasty, brutish
and all too short. For, while we see a great many decent persons
loving and serving others well, we also find in the media every
morning a tragic litany of disasters -- of neuroticism, sin and
evil.
We learn about
gunfights between drug dealers who slay ten year old girls in
their homes, Enron, Anderson and World Com executives who steal
the retirement security from thousands of persons and spouse and
child abuse so vicious it would horrify a Nazi storm trooper.
Without sound spiritual values, positive attitudes, high
expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices -- persons
soon develop many self-defeating weaknesses in our activities
and relationships. All the possessions, power, prestige and
pleasure in the world cannot heal the aching wounds in the souls
of, narcissistic, secular minded men and women. There really is
only one escape from the universal tragic quartet of suffering,
rage, guilt and death -- and that is through spiritual growth
and a self-transcending lifestyle.
We, the men and
women trying to find our way in a secular society, are
frequently anxious and often conflicted souls who nevertheless
try to remain kind and loving with the persons we love. We give
of ourselves generously and graciously to those who accept and
support us. We like to think of humans as always kind and
generous. Unfortunately, many are much less loving and tolerant
of the persons and companies, and nations that challenge them
physically, psychologically or philosophically. In addition to
our frequent generosity, we humans often become selfish and
cruel when we ignore spiritual virtues, nurse painful childhood
neuroses or become frustrated and alienated by the secular
lifestyle we have thrust upon us. This is why almost one hundred
wars are fought around the world every year, why our mental
hospitals are crowded and why we are building more new prisons
to house malefactors than American colleges.
VIEW CONTENTS of The
Liberated Soul
I should
clear three important things right up front.
FIRST --
When I
use the word existential, I mean that something relates to the
life-style we chose to live or have thrust upon us by our
society. It has nothing to do with the bitter European
philosophy of Existentialism that welled up out of two brutal
World
Wars,
the murderous Holocaust, the
debilitating Cold War, and terrorism in a war between two
civilizations.
SECOND --
Many
confuse esthetics with spirituality, apparently unaware that
humans have always been a religious race -- that every one of
our civilizations was built around religious values and beliefs.
Some of the worship was simplistic and occasionally very cruel
as with the Aztecs, but the clergy were more often scholars and
engineers and occasionally rulers. Humans have always needed
mystic and supernatural experiences and relationships to feel at
home in a vast and mysterious Cosmos. That yearning reflects our
need to connect metaphysically with the Creator. For, we are all
vulnerable to self-defeating choices until we develop strong
spiritual natures that take us closer to God's ideal for us in
the community in which we belong.
THIRD --
No one is mature once and for
all. We cannot become completely free of our neurotic defenses
for they have been locked within our genes from the beginning --
from our days as small and skinny beings on the ever dangerous
African savannah. I surely wouldn't want to face my daily
challenges without a little armor to protect my precious ego.
After all, life itself and death just over the horizon, remain
serious threats against which we all need to maintain a few
comforting illusions and subjective defenses. The best we can
do, what we need to do, is live with a spiritual mindset that
keeps our anxieties and narcissistic defenses from overwhelming
us and crippling our most vital activities and relationships. We
all need cosmic connections with something or someone that gives
us far greater meaning and fulfillment than our meager human
resources can supply.
I do
indeed understand the pessimism of
Existentialism's
Sartre, Buber, Camus and others -- after my father's generation,
my generation and my son's generation waded through a sea of fire
and blood across the 20th century's appalling madness.
Humans have always faced times of disaster and I simply cannot be
persuaded by any Pollyanna belief that the bloody century of one
hundred million battle deaths, in which I and my friends came to
adulthood, was merely a short cultural aberration in an otherwise
delightful human history. Along with Freud and others, I find much
psychospiritual failure present in every human society.
Fortunately I have discovered through a band of brilliant scholars
I have studied for half a century, and from my own scholarship and
experiences, that a
spiritual lifestyle does indeed make life consistently
liberating and satisfying to sincere seekers. Each of us can
create a personally liberated life, although none of us shall
stumble across it as one might find a quarter on the sidewalk.
We humans are
deeply subjective beings, are anxious homosapiens who experience
mind boggling challenges because we are all thinking souls
incorporated into finite and earthy mammal bodies. We are
creature-selves. This odd-couple type combination leads to our
greatest existential dilemma or paradox. It isn't that body,
mind and spirit are separate entities so much as each aspect of
the self serves different functions in every person's life. As
Jesus taught his disciples, as the psychological greats such as
Soren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Laura Perls, Viktor Frankl, Karen
Horney, and Ernest Becker wrote, few of us manage the
existential dilemma well. In other words, flesh and spirit,
hatred and love, greed and generosity -- compete within every
human, forming this creature-self paradox, making it difficult
to move toward soul liberation.
Many if not most
persons putter along - "Sunrise - Sunset, Sunrise - Sunset --
swiftly flow the days," from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Few of us find
some great cause or breathless love affair meaningful enough to
carry us out into the GREAT BEYOND of the Cosmos to which we are
all destined to return. And that's all right, for few of us are
geared for greatness. Unfortunately, most women and men do
indeed live out their lives in some degree of quiet desperation
because our homosapien suffering from our rage and guilt -- with
death lurking just over the hill, do frustrate us. Therefore, in
this work I share as best I can from half a century of
researching, the types of values, attitudes and choices that can
deliver the reader's soul from emotional and spiritual
alienation and bondage. I freely draw from the wisdom of the
world's best scholars -- to explore the causes of human
dissatisfaction and to examine a potential flood of joy and
satisfaction that lifts one's life to a consistently meaningful
level.
VIEW CONTENTS of The
Liberated Soul
THE LIBERATED SOUL
can be read
individually or used in a group. It is a book and a seminar that contains the best psychospiritual help available in the world
today. It comes from two centuries of research by a score or more of world class theologians, philosophers and psychotherapists of
various persuasions. Each of these excellent scholars earned lasting respect with his or her methods of combining knowledge
and wisdom, psychology
and
religion
and the
earthy elements of psychotherapy
with the more
spiritual aspects of worship.
My weaving of their
powerful contributions into a single approach goes far beyond
theoretical concepts -- for after my own fifty years of research
and work as a minister, professor, author and counselor, I get
down into the mud and blood of human rage, frustration, anxiety,
alienation and the mental illnesses that cripple so many souls. I
discuss the key causes of spiritual disorders --
existential alienation
and
self-defeating ego defenses, neuroticism, nihilism
and
human rage
-- that lurk hidden within every soul as a result of being a
narcissistic species.
In this
program you shall study my brilliant scholars' concepts and
recommendations through reading their presentations and my
interpretations of them, complete self-focus exercises and master
major projects that enable you to think through the important
aspects of your life. After having published such books as:
and
several other books, and having picked Viktor Frankl's brains
shamelessly, I feel qualified to interpret my chosen scholars. If
you will allow me to, I can help you;
If you
or a loved one find it difficult to live a consistently satisfying
life, often feeling defeated, depressed, frustrated or alienated
from others because of life's pressures within the family, on the
job or in the community, unable to live a consistently peaceful,
love-filled life, my scholars' wisdom can be a literal lifesaver
for you yourself and those you love.
VIEW CONTENTS of The
Liberated Soul
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LIBERATED SOUL
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The sooner you get started, the more satisfying your life shall
become.
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and DeVille Logotherapy Learning Center
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