Ernest Dempsey — Peace has been humanity’s ideal throughout its existence. Peace from suffering, as we mortals thinks of it, makes what we know as happiness. On a more spiritual side, for people who arrived at this desirable state, it is many a time peace through suffering. This latter route to achieving happiness in life makes the subject matter of psychologist Steve Taylor’s recent book Out of the Darkness (Hay House, 2011).Taylor explores through the accounts of people from various walks of life, including some famous figures, how trauma or turmoil leads to spiritual transformation of people who go through such life challenges. The people Taylor interviewed for his book saw physical and/or emotional pain to the point of excruciation—some of them getting into near-death situations and some left physically impaired for life. These pains did bring their gains eventually—happiness and harmony with life—not dissimilar to mother in labor who finds her precious gift in her hands after bearing through the suffering.
Among other points of interest, the psychological basis of this shift to the positive state of mind is particularly important. Taylor relates it to the key psychological entity is each of us—the ego. This kernel of our identity, as the author explains, keeps adding things, material and immaterial, to its list of ‘possessions’. This self-serving process of the ego to expand its territory results in attachment of our psychological machinery to things and ideas around us. Thus, our ego boundaries tighten against the ‘otherness’ as we make more of the world as part of ‘me’. Ego’s quest for the other to be made a part of us, not in spiritual but in a self-seeking, worldly manner, leaves us attached to an insatiable desire for things which fail to bring us lasting satisfaction. Thus, detachment is the key to true happiness.
Detachment in this sense translates into the dissolution of ego. The more you reach out to the ‘other’ and release yourself from the tightly-drawn ego boundaries of your ‘self’, the softer and less controlling this ego circle gets around your being. Taylor shows us in his book that when life is threatened by intense and/or continued pain, the egoistic attachments crumble under the pressure of the crisis. Our true self, free from ego’s captivity, stops living a life of inner calculations in terms of past and future. Instead, we enter the present moment in all its fullness, its richness. Our life choices change; our values get refined; we are out of the darkness, and into the light that shows us our true worth—something we won’t trade for diamonds.
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Steve Taylor’s interview about spiritual transformation will be published in the April 2011 issue of Recovering the Self– a journal of hope and healing.