The rate of change, the acceleration, is enormous. I can remember being at Sydney University where the first computer in Australia was housed. It was referred to as “the monster”. It was a valve computer occupying a huge room. In 25 years it has come down to a desk top computer; in the next 10 years to lap top. I guess the only thing that is certain is change – and that can be scary.
I really think however, the need to write now arises from what has happened in Western culture over the last two hundred years or so. The most significant thing that has happened in Western culture has been the influence of materialism. This has been underpinned by the scientific and industrial age and has led to the rapid progress we have made in the physical circumstances of our lives. Whilst I speak broadly of Western culture, and come from a position within a Western culture, I believe that some of these trends have also been apparent throughout the world over the same period.
All this physical progress has culminated in our own time. It has resulted in paradoxical situations where our physical progress has caused us to lose contact with the physical realities of life. Just think of life in a city apartment block, or in an ordinary house anywhere in Australia. The dwellings are rainproof, windproof, insulated, heated, air conditioned, carpeted, mosquito proof and so on. The trains we take to work are smooth riding, sound proofed, and climatically controlled. When we get there our workplace is invariably enclosed from the sun, wind and rain and is air conditioned. Everything is controlled so we never experience the contrasting sensations of hotness or coldness, darkness or light, wind or sun, or the feeling of rain pelting in our faces.
Let me give you a tremendous example I read of in a recent Sydney Morning Herald. The fact is that it is now impossible to properly see the night sky from Sydney. The light given off from the city, the man made light that is, has swamped the incoming lights from the stars. Of the three thousand individual stars that should be visible with the naked eye from anywhere in New South Wales, only about 100 can now be seen from the centre of Sydney. Two things have happened here. Firstly, our progress has cut us off from the simple physical pleasure of seeing the stars. Secondly, and worse, we are now severed from the mental and spiritual ad-venture of staring up on a starlit night and wondering about the meaning of it all. We have lost one of the great physical prompts that made past generations think about eternity, constancy, beginnings, ends, purpose and spiritual meaning.
One of the problems of the twentieth century is therefore that we have lost touch with ourselves, our physical selves as well as our inner selves. The challenge for many of us is to redevelop contact with ourselves and rediscover the use of our inner strength.
This is not to say that Western culture as a whole has utterly lost its way on the subject of inner strength. Many institutions, groups, writers, artists and ordinary people have held instinctively to ancient knowledge about our inner strength. What it is to say, however, is that the consciousness of the powers of our inner strength has been on the backburner in our culture for a long time.
The history of human development has been patchy. Sometimes great advances are made in one area of human endeavour whilst other areas of achievement catch up later. The last 200 years has seen unparalleled advances in every aspect of our physical surroundings. Just think of the advances in public health, transport, electronics, manufacturing, distribution and power generation. The list goes on and on and it's indisputable that these things have dramatically improved our standard of living.
But in this period of physical advancement the use of many of our spiritual powers has languished. The reason for this is that it was quite natural, upon seeing the dramatic advances achieved by the scientific and industrial revolution, that people should think that all their problems could be eventually solved by material progress. In other times and in other cultures the opposite has happened. People have achieved great spiritual, philosophical and artistic advances whilst living in conditions of utter poverty when compared to the standards of living we enjoy today. Just think of the spiritual achievements of the English Mystics in medieval times, or the Aboriginal people of Australia, or the American Indians, or the great works of people like Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Michaelangelo and Beethoven. Their material standards of living can only be described as abysmal when compared to the standards we enjoy today. And yet they used their inner strength to achieve great advances for mankind.
But certainly, when we look at the patchy nature of human progress, we have been in a materialistic phase over the last several hundred years. We have believed that the answer to our problems lies in material solutions.
This belief is either breaking down or reaching a point where people no longer believe that purely material solutions are the answer to all their problems. An example of the breakdown of the idea that everything can be solved by physical solutions came with the work of Maxwell Malz, the author of Psycho-Cybernetics. He was a plastic surgeon who noticed that his repairs to people did not have any effect on the people themselves. In the case where people suffered lack of self confidence because of physical disfigurement, he found that his operations to change the disfigurement gave the people no improved hope. They still lacked confidence, they were still damaged on the inside. Maxwell Malz found that he had to accompany his surgical work with a process of mental work as well, creating “imagined memories”, building in them the thoughts of a possible new life. Malz also describes cases in Psycho-Cybernetics where the patient has formed a negative image of something which is actually healthy, for example a nose. One patient came to him complaining that her nose was grossly oversized, so much so that she felt she was disfigured. It so happened that she also suffered a personality disorder.
Dr Malz managed to prove to her that her nose was normal and gave her a program of mental exercises to do so that she would come to believe this. She did the exercises for 21 days and slowly her mind changed until she perceived her nose as normal. As her bad image of her nose disappeared so too did her personality disorder. In my work I use the words, “the sub conscious mind does not know the difference between imagination and reality”. It is a similar concept to Malz's idea of imagined memories.
We are on the verge, or we have recently just begun, an era of new awareness of the potential of our inner strength. I don't believe that we should seek to overthrow the exciting advances that materialism has brought us. Who would want to do that? But I do believe that we will start to use our mental powers and the strength that comes from within in a much more deliberate way in our daily lives.
How then can we use it? How can we use our inner strength deliberately? What benefits can come to us if we can discover techniques to tap into this rich resource? The rest of this book will help you find the answers to these questions. I will give you a theoretical basis for your study and, more importantly, some really practical advice on how to get there. Remember, the aim is, Deliberate use, Deliberate use, Deliberate use.
A note from Sandy:
Michael is an inspirational example as to how he regularly uses his inner strength. He is the Youth Ambassador for the Hills Shire District, a trainer of ten Australian ski racing champions and founder of Seminar House Strategic Personal Training.
Michael is also the Junior Australian Coach for Ski Racing.
I awoke at 8am on 13th March 1993. It was a beautiful day as a few loner clouds sailed through the ocean blue sky, like giant icebergs. I was full steam ahead in the direction of my chosen destiny. I had established an honour's grade in the short time I had been attending college. I was winning a local ski race series in both my age group and the Open Men's Division, which was in line with my goal of becoming World Champion. I had a fantastic trainer, a beautiful girlfriend and a family that facilitated unconditional love like nothing you had ever seen. Life was a grand piano and I the great pianist.
At 8pm sundown that evening my life had taken on a slightly different direction. To begin with it was not my bedroom that was to be my point of refuge but rather a large white building, commonly known as a hospital. I was taking an arsenal of nine tablets and capsules every four hours in a poor attempt to deal with the torturous pain alone. It was not the most serene