One can never reach the Supreme Reflective Entity – pratisam’vedii by following the path of analysis. That path causes one to believe that one’s mother, father, and even the limbs of one’s own body are all separate entities. The path of spirituality is the path of synthesis. It is the path which synthesizes the many into one, and helps one to discover the Supreme unity in the midst of diversity. The one who treads the path of synthesis ultimately discovers that what was once multiplicity has been transformed into the supreme singularity. — Shrii Shrii Anandamurti¹.

The process of turning inside – pratyáhára – is fundamental to the practice of spiritual meditation and higher realizations. All classical systems, such as Raja and Rájádhirája yoga, speak of the need for steering, or converting, the crude functions of mind into increasingly subtler states of being. Correctly performed the yogic process of pulling back the sensory apparatus into the mental evolves an enhanced sense of self and comprehensive cognizance. It enables the practitioner to be able to concentrate well, and is in itself a consciousness-raising tool taking the mind towards the Cosmic. Despite (or perhaps because of) such rich rewards, many beginners soon give up on the idea of going within to find bliss. What may have been imagined as a stroll through the gates of paradise instead turned into a wandering in a wilderness of most uncomfortable stretches of emotional instability, mental unsteadiness, and physical unease – back pain, sore knees etc. In a word, the prelude to the great symphony of meditation is no stroll in the park but a skill mastered swiftly only by the few.

On this reality Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) wrote:

How hard it is to control the mind. Well has it been compared to the maddened monkey. There was a monkey, restless by its own nature, as all monkeys are. As if that were not enough, someone made him drink freely of wine, so that he became still more restless. Then a scorpion stung him. When a man is stung by a scorpion he jumps about for the whole day; so the poor monkey found his condition worse than ever. To complete his misery, a demon entered him. What language can describe the uncontrollable restlessness of that monkey? The human mind is like that monkey; incessantly active by its own nature; then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy of the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance. How hard it is to control such a mind²!

Vivekananda’s advice is simply to “sit out” all the restlessness just by observing calmly every aspect of the uncontrollable mind, including its sometimes hideous thoughts. “You will find that each day the mind’s vagaries are becoming less and less violent, that each day it is becoming calmer … until at last the mind will be under perfect control, but we must patiently practice every day.” The working principle here is: You control all that you know of yourself; what remains unknown to you controls you.

The Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli accepted this ancient principle and made it the basis of his Psychosynthesis: “We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate, direct, and utilize everything from which we dis-identify ourselves.” Assagioli developed psychosynthesis as a spiritually-oriented psychology demonstrating a deep understanding of the challenges of spiritual awakening, the place of the will in self-realization work, and the importance of synthesis (and not only analysis) in individual and collective life. He defined this system as “a method for self-realization, psychotherapy and education” always emphasizing the crying need for identifying, accepting, integrating and synthesizing internal and external opposites into greater ‘wholes’.

Useful Aids in Meditation

In the case of the psycho-spiritual approach, or psycho-spiritual movement, we should always remember that human beings are just like electrons moving around the nucleus of an atom. And by dint of our spiritual cult we will have to reduce the difference between the moving electron and its nucleus. The length of the radius is to be lessened by dint of our meditation. And a day is sure to come when the length of this radius will become zero and the electron will become one with the nucleus; that is; the living being, the spiritual aspirant, will be one with Supreme Consciousness. — Shrii Shrii Anandamurti³.

There cannot be anything without a nucleus, a core. There cannot be an atom without a core. There cannot be any living organism without a central life with keeping the life organized for the purpose of permanence and growth. So you have to say there is always inevitably a core, and what I have done is only to apply this reality specifically to psychosynthesis of the human being, both at the personal and the transpersonal. There could not be any order, any harmony, and real life of a personality without a synthesizing centre. But the personality is not yet synthesized. It is a constant, dramatic interplay between subsidiary centres of sub-personalities, or drives, or all kinds of contents of the personality, and the synthesizing centre which has such a hard time. But it is there, and however partial and unsatisfactory to a certain point in the so-called normal individual, it is a co-ordinating, bringing together element. Therefore psychosynthesis, first, second and third, is the working from the centre. That centre you see is synthesizing not in itself. I repeat it is a static, pure being but it acts. This is a paradox, also another central point to realize and then enough for today. The Self radiates. Aristotle called it in that fine paradox the “Immovable mover.” It is immovable but sets in motion everything else. — Assagioli⁴.

Before we move on to practical psychosynthesis work and its usefulness as an aid to meditation, we would do very well to remind ourselves that the Ananda Marga system of meditation prepares the mind superbly for meditation, by the singing of kiirtan as well as other beneficial and valuable means such as the maintenance of pure (sattvik) diet, regular yoga exercises (asanas), refreshing the body with cool water (half bath) before meditation and other everyday activities, seeking uplifting company (satsaunga), etc. In fact these and other significant expedients such as adhering to a spiritual moral code, living an active purposeful life, etc., not only have a profound effect on one’s entire being but are essential to spiritual meditation.

The benefit and advantage of these practical approaches and their enormously positive effects on spiritual practices cannot be overstated, and they take precedence by far over the psychosynthetical approaches presented in this article. Their great significance is due to the fact that the goal and purpose of spiritual meditation is the One Source of all purity, morality, purpose, good company, etc., that is Supreme Consciousness; because of the loftiness of that spiritual goal Itself, it is impossible to proceed towards It without making consistent efforts to purify oneself, living ethically, purposefully, etc. The subject of these means would constitute volumes of work however; hence they are mentioned here only in brief.

Recognizing Polarities In Order to Evolve Synthesis

Polarity is a universal fact; it is inherent in cosmic manifestation. It is true that the Ultimate and Supreme Reality is the One, the Absolute, the Transcendent; but it can only be defined by what it is not. From the very moment that cosmic manifestation begins to unfold, duality is born. The first fundamental duality is precisely that between manifestation and the Unmanifest. In the Bhagavad Giita this is expressed in the words: “Having pervaded the whole Universe with a fragment of myself, I remain.” In the process of manifestation the fundamental polarity is that of Spirit and Creation. — Assagioli⁵.

Turning inside makes us face our inner reality. It causes a constructive shift of awareness from the generally stressed, superficial and temporary conditions of the outer world towards the more reflective, subtle, enduring spheres of the internal. In large parts of the entrance and “antechamber” areas of this inner universe where we first come in, our personal reality has been continuously captured, gathered and stored every second, minute, day, week, month and year of our life. The meeting with all of this can be shocking if not demoralising. Often seriously fragmented and sometimes critically split, this is the reality that we first of all have to survey as we begin the search for our truer self. Any kind of investigation of another person or thing is not at all needed in order for us to carry out this particular internal work of ours. It requires only a balanced and determined mind to carry this most sincere effort to its successful conclusion. A collected and persistent mind able to achieve this is what we want to train by the helpful, insightful approach of psychosynthesis.

The process of turning inside does not mean escape, neglect, repression or turning away from reality, however disturbing or harsh it may be. This particular approach of yogic spiritual meditation means to establish balance, harmony and proper proportion with the total sum of all Reality and is not a symptom of fleeing outer reality.

“Much of our ordinary mental activity does not merit the term ‘thought’,” wrote Assagioli in an opening statement on the value of spiritual meditation in clinical and personal development work⁶. In our effort to establish a platform within ourselves on which we may safely sit for meditation we only come across “inaccessible” storage rooms stuffed to the roof with physical impressions, emotional ups and downs, particular patterns of thinking, typical ways of relating to others – all sorts of rubbish, as it were – that keeps upsetting and sometimes arrests altogether our effort to delve inside, thereby threatening to nip the entire meditation process in the bud. Strange, to keep so much garbage inside! Why not empty all this gobbledygook somewhere? But where … By examining such great trouble points properly, both in our meditation as well as in our everyday life, working on them in a structured manner, we may make our inner and outer paths smooth and gradually merge these “currents of mindstream” into fewer and broader courses until there remain only one singular flow for us – our very own particular path to perfection.

The first psychosynthesis approach or technique we will take up here is the balancing and synthesizing of opposites. An initial step towards creating greater harmony out of imbalance and disturbance is to accept or recognize that whatever troubles us really does exist. In the same way as the roots of any conflict are found in the absence of genuine communication, the ancestry of existential alienation is found in the ignorance of what is really present. Wherever there is disharmony, unrest, frustration or any form of restlessness we can then and there conclude that the troublesome expression or element that keeps troubling us is sure to be a component of a non-accepted multi-polar structure, such as a bi-polar, tri-polar, etc. structure consisting of mutually antagonistic and excluding extremes.

Identifying and recognizing the existence of such extremes is essential to the evolvement of greater and more meaningful reality. Plainly speaking this means that if some persons have tendencies to be angry, greedy, and jealous or whatever, the same persons will also have one or more opposite tendencies, such as to placate others, to indulge in self pity, to feel the need to cover up for something, etc. If any of these extremes are at all known to such persons, what is surely largely unknown to them (but not necessarily to their family and friends) is the exchange mechanisms between those extremes. This is exactly what is bothering such persons and those around them, even to the point of threatening to seriously unsettle their lives altogether.

Whatever the alternate expression, the two or more extremes will be in opposition to another and together they will form a semi-conscious or fully unconscious pattern of fluctuating states of mind and behaviour that keep obstructing their path to inner and outer harmony and peace. Hence, identification and acceptance of the reality of BOTH or more such extremes and consequently the pattern they form is necessary as an obvious first step towards sublime resolution.

The following example uses polarities of two extremes (bi-polar structures). When differentiated, we will see how these extremes consist of a plethora of potential for personal growth.

At times I’m NO-NONSENSE	↔	At other times I’m DREAMY
Some things RAISE me	↔	Other things DEPRESS me
Someone instils CONFIDENCE in me	↔	Another instils DOUBT in me
This makes me feel GOOD	↔	That makes me feel BAD
Here I become ACCOMMODATING	↔	There I become DISOBLIGING
WE do it this way	↔	THEY do it that way
etc.

The above chart displays a few simple bi-polar structures that are common enough for most people to recognize. Let’s assume one such polarity that we feel no longer serves any constructive purpose. Rather we understand it has become an obstacle to our progress. The following chart shows an example of such polar, fluctuating tendencies:

Here I express REGARD

↔

There I express DISGUST

Our first task is as we now know simply to accept, or recognize, that two extremes at the opposite end of a scale actually exist. As we do that, memories and feelings of all kinds may arise and remind us of their history and various realities. By following Vivekananda’s good advice and just observe them as they emerge one by one, we will be able to both register them properly, and make a separate space for ourself and our sense and faculty of discernment and power of judgement as well. In this way we clear a lot of room in the particularly packed store room we now find ourselves in, and we will discover that there is suddenly room for much more here, as if by magic some mystical agency hitherto unknown to us has assisted us in an essential clear-up, the result of which is that we feel greatly relieved.

Secondly we will begin to differentiate the respective diversity of the extremes in question. Beginning with one of them – for instance the tendency to express REGARD – we now want to reflect on the meaning of expressing such ‘regard’; why we become sympathetic in certain situations and with some people and not with others. What does ‘regard’ actually mean in our case; what are the upsides and downsides to it; what are the gains and losses of this particular extreme of this conflicting polarity of ours?

As showing REGARD is mostly taken in the positive, we may as well choose to pick out ‘positives’ first, such as for instance ‘humane’, ‘involved, ‘active’, ‘supportive’ and many more that may reveal themselves to us. On the ‘negative’ side ‘flattery, ‘cowardly’, ‘conform’, ‘losing myself’ and scores of others may come up.

After taking sufficient time to differentiate satisfactorily the first extreme, it is time to have a look at the other. Being DISGUSTED, which is conceived more or less as a unhelpful attitude, it would be better to start with the ‘negatives’ as they may appear more easily, such as ‘hateful’, ‘one-eyed’, ‘sick of’, ‘shocked’ and certainly many more. On the more constructive and perhaps wholesome side, ‘positives’ could include ‘displeased’, ‘unromantic’, ‘authentic’, ‘honest’ and many more.

Having exhausted both extremes in this manner, our next task is to systematize our findings in a particular structure, in the form of a triangle. Thus we will be able to reflect on the numerous distinctions of our polarity in a greater context, the goal of which will be to explore any potential for their elevation and synthesis into something more meaningful and constructive.

The figure below displays the original triangle with some notable aspects of both extremes:

[inline:1]

A compromise on the middle of the baseline: INDIFFERENT, was added as well. Recognizing the character and position of our compromising nature is crucial to the realization of the extent of our chaos. This middling or mediocre (you name it) settlement may entail that we sometimes hold back our regard in order to save our prestige while at other times we may turn our disgust on ourselves for a lack of healthy moral courage or due to some nondescript fear of retribution. A way of managing such a compromise is to cover its uncontrolled fluctuations behind a mask of studied ‘cool’ – indifference.

The emerging awareness of the intolerable states that such compromise entails comes in the form of increasing external and internal conflicts. The ensuing clashes characterized by anxiety, fear, argumentativeness, anger, jealousy, hopelessness, depression – take your pick – are what makes it perfectly clear to us that a particular pattern of fluctuation between a number of extremes is undesirable and meaningless and something we should really strive to work on as they may have severe repercussions in any area of our life.

With our triangle in place and its two opposites differentiated and a compromise defined on the base line, our job now is to engage the various elements of one side of the triangle base with suitable elements of the other in order to evolve greater integration and ultimately synthesis. It is creativity, intuition and fantasy time! No problem, we will feel the breathtaking reality of it at any rate.

Here we are free to play around with both the ‘positives’ and ‘negatives’ of one side and juxtapose them with any of the other side. For instance I may feel that when I tend to flatter (on the ‘negative’ side of showing regard), in reality what I express is my deeper ability to honour a person. Whereas when I am one-eyed (on the ‘negative’ side of disgust) I draw on my inherent capacity to remain persistent, consistent, and principled. Together these two resources that have now surfaced — ability to honour another and being principled — amalgamate into the more profound ‘according dignity to another’. An elevated synthesis as opposed to the base compromise now enhances the worth of both another person and myself, in keeping with my own deeper values and principles.

In this way apparently differing or conflicting aspects of opposites or polarities may be explored and paired into new and more purposeful and powerful syntheses. In this process certain elements on either side may lend themselves more easily to the process of integration and synthesis than others. This is only how it should be; as long as we get one, two or more syntheses in the middle area of the triangle we will be richly rewarded.

The most elevated or final synthesis of it all has be positioned on the apex of the triangle. In this particular case, as you will see, it turned out to be GENUINE INTEREST:

[inline:2]

The benefits of such a synthesis-oriented and even psycho-spiritual approach in the intellectual, psychic, etc. arena may be conveyed in numerous ways:

• The fragmented psyche is integrated and synthesized into one’s coherent self.
• Confused, frustrated, disturbed and even perverted energies are differentiated and put into perspective, transformed, evolved into the area of cardinal human values.
• The mind is established as a constructive friend and partner, and not a perennial victim of constant chaos.
• Establishing inner role models of affirmative upsurge and not vicious vertigo at different levels; psychotherapeutic and psycho-spiritual value.
• The continuous exploration and assimilation of crude and subtler causes grow into sense of greater permanence.
• Whereas the earlier personality was subject to more or less conscious fluctuating emotions, memories, etc. one’s willpower is now churned, strengthened, and consciously applied.
• Maturing self-insight – increasingly and improving contact with one’s higher Self – confirms inherent faculty to evolve, sustain, and prevail.

• All the above facilitates the dissolution of further disharmony and even severe internal disturbances that otherwise may have been continuously neglected or pushed into a “shadow” personality.

Disidentification and Ideation: I Have Certain Feelings and I Am More than Them

We will now study a crucial point of the internalization process of spiritual meditation, namely the dis-/identification or ideational process. Although the last word of spiritual meditation is the One, often sweeping feelings of separation, frustration, self-reproach, analytical criticism, etc. surface midstream in the process. These are what the Buddha identified as vasanas, the overcoming of which leads to nirvana – without fluctuations. Those who have already familiarized themselves a little with the inner path know such fluctuating feelings are no more than dirt on one’s clothes ready to be cleaned after a really long journey through this dusty world of ours. But to the beginner, emerging as well as recurrent feelings of inner rupture and disturbances may be perceived as acute pain and terrible confusion. Aspirants to the Throne of Celestial Peace may feel that the Buddha was right indeed, the world does consist of only pain and there is very little room for bliss in it. But then again, both the message and goal of spiritual meditation is that everything comes out of, exists in, and is finally redeemed in Supreme Bliss of the One Permanent Being. In this great and terrible squeeze of almost total agony and helplessly reaching out for release, surrendering to the idea of “having and not being” may be of great value.

The invention of general semantics⁷ by Polish-American Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) may be of value in the quest for greater clarity in the psycho-existential field. According to Wikipedia, Korzybski developed his system as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and ‘common sense’ assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but is not precisely a therapeutic system, being in general more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology. According to Korzybski, the central goal of general semantics is to develop what he called “consciousness of abstracting” in its practitioners, that is, an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how much of reality is missed in the linguistic and other representations we use. General semantics teaches that it is not sufficient to understand this sporadically and intellectually, but rather that we achieve full sanity only when consciousness of abstracting becomes constant.

According to the American semantics psychologist (and Korzybski admirer) Samuel I. Hayakawa (1906-1992) “the symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for” [8]. While Aristotle held that a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined, general semantics denies the existence of any such definitive relative essence. This observation echoes the ancient Hindu non-dualism (advaeta vada) of “neither this, nor that” (neti, neti). The Ultimate Reality beyond time, place and person cannot be fully captured by the media of sound, form, touch, smell or taste; neither can It be fully expressed by human voice, gesture, etc.

The philosophy of Ananda Marga approves and establishes a number of fundamental differences between the world of human beings and that of the absolute existence of Supreme Being. One such fundamental difference is that humans see everything as diverse and external, whereas the Supreme holds everything as One and within. Hence a correct way of thinking is “None of this is really me”: I may feel such and such feelings; that such and such thing belongs to me; that my birthplace is there and my home is here but in reality I have none of them as I myself am also created by and within Supreme Being. The way to realize this Supreme Being is not to identify myself totally with any relative feeling, thought or object such as “this makes me feel GOOD but that makes me feel BAD,” etc. Instead I would do well to disidentify from such feelings by way of identifying them as expressions of the Supreme and go on to identify myself totally with that Being: “I am that Supreme Being and so is everything else of this world.”

In reality we are not our emotions, family members, belongings, etc. We have them, on loan as it were, and some day we will have to return them all and even ourselves in order to exchange our limited existence with the most exalted existence of Supreme, Immaculate, Pure Being. This proper ideational approach or mode of identification is characteristic of the system of Ananda Marga meditation and its practices may be learnt from a teacher of that system. Here we will limit ourselves to looking at a particular psychosynthesis technique for inducing or reinforcing such disidentification and ideation in psychic and psycho-spiritual spheres in order to smooth our path of spiritual progress.

When we get a feeling, such as “He or she makes me mad”, our fundamental mistake, according to the ancient teachings of non-dualism as well as those of Korzybski’s general semantics, is that we tend to identify totally with those relative forms and the reactions they excite in us. Not only that, we actually keep on identifying with the remains of such relative phenomena that linger in us until they are no longer seen as separate from us but are firmly lodged in the deeper recesses of our personal consciousness and being. Thus they are no longer our object but we have become their object and they have become our heart and soul. This means we are no longer able to see them as different from us and they now operate from within ourselves as any virus or foreign agent would, and as a proper “fifth column” as far as spiritual realization and inner peace is concerned.

The value of the healthy approach of non-dualism and general semantics is to awaken our genuine self from its self-induced stupor and make it act on the situation. If not we will just continue to misconstrue elements foreign to ourselves to be the expression of our own personal truth, the result of which is an increasingly mental instability and disturbance with which we fully identify ourselves. Thus writes Assagioli in his original psychosynthesis manual:

In our ordinary life we are limited and bound in a thousand ways – the prey of illusions and phantasms, the slaves of unrecognized complexes, tossed hither and thither by external influences, blinded and hypnotized by deceiving appearances. No wonder then that man, in such a state, is often discontented, insecure and changeable in his moods, thoughts and actions. Feeling intuitively that he is ‘one,’ and yet finding that he is ‘divided unto himself,’ he is bewildered and fails to understand either himself or others. No wonder that he, not knowing or understanding himself, has no self-control and is continually involved in his own mistakes and weaknesses; that so many lives are failures, or are at least limited and saddened by diseases of mind and body, or tormented by doubt, discouragement and despair. No wonder that man, in his blind passionate search for liberty and satisfaction, rebels violently at times, and at times tries to still his inner torment by throwing himself headlong into a life of feverish activity, constant excitement, tempestuous emotion, and reckless adventure⁹.

The basic exercise of psychosynthesis addresses this issue directly. The subject of the exercise is “disidentifaction from one’s fragmented psyche and identification with Higher Self”. In principle the exercise goes as follows:

• I have a body, but I am more than my body. I am the One who is aware: the Self, the Nucleus. My body may be rested or tired, active or inactive, but I remain the same, the Observer at the Centre of all my experience. I am aware of my body, but I am more than my body.
• I have emotions, but I am more than my emotions. Whether I feel excited or dull, I recognize that I am Unchanging. I have emotions, but I am more than my emotions.
• I have an intellect, but I am more than my intellect. Regardless of my thoughts and regardless of how my beliefs have changed over the years, I remain the One who is aware, the One who chooses – the One who directs my thinking process. I have an intellect, but I am more than that.

• I am a Centre of Pure Awareness. I am the One who chooses. I am the Self.

The effort here is first on putting an arm’s length between the overwhelming, disturbing or whatever feeling, action, person, etc. in order to get sufficient space for oneself to identify or ideate properly: Secondly, all these elements are confirmed as expressions of Supreme Being, the centre and reflection of which is “I”. Ananda Marga philosophy terms this final spiritual concept as non-dualist dualist non-dualism: At the outset all is One, in the middle the One appears to be many, and finally It becomes One again.

Fragmented Mindstuff Synthesized Into A Greater Self

As previously mentioned psychosynthesis is described as both a method of psychotherapy and self-realization as well as of education. The main effect of the many exercises of its comprehensive methodology is the emergence of substantiated “I” as a result of synthesis in the previously fragmented psyche or mindstuff (citta).

As regards the alarming rate of increasing mental disturbance today, it may be noted that the when a person loses his or herself in any process of developing oneself, the gates of severe disturbances and madness are flung wide open. It is this we see when people throw all caution to the wind in a mad rush for meaning and fulfilment in apparently available areas of material and lower psychic enjoyment and accumulation. Here our mindstuff is being continuously fragmented in processes of identification of and ideation on crude expressions.

Conversely the personal self is strengthened when our fragmented mindstuff is synthesized in proper psychic and psycho-spiritual approaches. This is in keeping with the science of mind (mano vijinana) of Rájádhirája yoga, and should be of particular interest to practitioners of spiritual meditation as this particular synthesis work on mind in itself will be an asset in meditation.

In the first stage of synthesis one will have to consolidate all the expressions of the sense organs and then withdraw them into mindstuff. Suppose you see something. The original waves of an object assimilated by your eye organ will be reflected in your mindstuff. Only then will you be able to perceive that object. But if those waves assimilated by your eyes are not properly reflected in mindstuff you cannot see anything. In the next stage the existence of mindstuff is substantiated by doer-I (ahamtattva), its reflecting plate. Thus, on the path of synthesis mindstuff, will have to be merged in doer-I. In the subsequent stage all the faculties of doer-I will have to be merged into the existential I (mahatattva). And in the fourth stage the faculties of existential I will have to be merged in unit consciousness (jiivatma). The final reflecting plate in existence (pratisam’vedii) is Supreme Consciousness. Thus in the process of synthesis, human beings move towards Parama Purus’a. – Shrii Shrii Anandamurti¹⁰.

In our everyday life we have to work rationally with relative reality as well as evolving our adoration of the Supreme in our effort to develop a more subtle and meaningful existence beyond petty expressions. As the saying goes, “one has to be someone in order to become something else”. The benefits of psychosynthesis, general semantics, and other spiritually oriented systems of human development are that they allow us to explore past and present failures and successes with the wisdom that any shadow in the kingdom of light surely conceals something of worth.

From a still wider and more comprehensive point of view, universal life itself appears to us as a struggle between multiplicity and unity – a labor and an aspiration towards union. We seem to sense that – whether we conceive it as a Divine Being or as cosmic energy – the Spirit working upon and within all creation is shaping it into order, harmony and beauty, uniting all beings (some willing but the majority as yet blind and rebellious) with each other through links of love, achieving – slowly and silently, but powerfully and irresistibly – the Supreme Synthesis. – Assagioli¹¹.

Endnotes

¹ Quote from Subháśita Sam’graha, pt. 10, “The Omni-reflective Cognitive Consciousness”, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, Ananda Marga Publications, Kolkata.

² Quote from The Complete Works of Vivekananda, Mayavati Memorial Edition (Almora, 1915).

³ Quote from Ánanda Vacanámrtam Part 12, “The Four Kinds of Approach”, Ananda Marga Publ., Kolkata.

⁴ Quote from Talks on the Self, R. Assagioli.

⁵ Quote from The Balancing and Synthesis of the Opposites, R. Assagioli.

⁶ The Act of Will, R. Assagioli, David Platts Publ. Co., Woking (UK) 1999, page 220.

⁷ The theory and educational discipline of general semantics developed by Korzybski. Is not the same as semantics, the science of meaning expressed in language, code, or any other form.

⁸ Quote from Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York 1949, p.31.

⁹ Quote from Psychosynthesis, R. Assagioli, Hobbs, Dorman & Co., USA 1965, pp. 20-21.

¹⁰ Quote from Subháśita Sam’graha, pt. 10, “The Omni-reflective …”

¹¹ Quote from Psychosynthesis, p. 31.