Questioning the assumptions of many "new age" and "personal development" methodologies

Over the last forty years the western world has witnessed an extraordinary growth of interest in personal development. Each year more and more people are becoming involved in a movement that promises growth, greater self-understanding, inner contentment, improved relationships, wealth, health, and so on. Many of us have been active participants in these traditions and programs. Others have been keen observers of these developments, waiting for an approach that suits their needs and temperament.

This heart-felt need for a better life has given rise to hundreds of different methods and thousands of courses for improving the quality of our lives. Whilst the very range and complexity of options have been useful they have also been confusing. Certainly many people who would not otherwise have been exposed to developing their potential have had opportunities to grow, learn and establish more satisfying lives. On the other hand, the enormous range and sometimes exaggerated promises for happiness and satisfaction have served to perplex and disappoint many. People don't know where next to turn, or which advice to take.

What, then, makes Radiant Mind Course valuable at a time there are so many psychological/self-development/spiritual workshops, seminars, and retreats? How can we justify yet another development?

This Course comes at a time when many people are questioning the capacity for existing approaches and techniques to create the real and lasting happiness that they promise. Such questioning isn't hollow since many who are sensing this limitation have been ardent and committed participants in the full range of self-development methods for twenty years or more.

While the existing paradigm has opened up new possibilities for increased happiness and well-being, it has also rejected other avenues and perspectives that are genuine and authentic sources of inner harmony and health.

As a consequence we are now witnessing the emergence of a new approach to well-being, or - as we would have it - the re-discovery of a timeless perspective in a new cultural setting.

Most of the assumptions that underscore the current methodologies for growth and self-development existed prior to the Western interest self-development that began around forty years ago. They are beliefs that we, as humans, invented thousands of years ago for the purpose of ensuring our survival and well-being. Some of these beliefs are:

We can control what we experience.

We can choose how we act.

The past affects the present.

Our childhood experiences shape our personality.

Change requires work and application.

The future can be better than the present.

The main contribution of the human potential and self development movements has been the "empowerment" of these and other beliefs. They have appropriated and then leveraged these beliefs in the service of human fulfillment. Thus many of the programs teach us how to "control our thoughts", "manage our lives", "create what we want", "eradicate the negative experiences of childhood", or "replace negative with positive beliefs."

While we don't reject such beliefs, we do question the breadth and value of programs that explicitly exclude beliefs that conflict with their own. We question the capacity of these methodologies to thoroughly and comprehensively address the breakdown of stress and conflict that is so prevalent in our lives.

Since it is these and related beliefs that are being questioned in a new, emerging paradigm we will briefly examine the types of blindness that such beliefs can produce. We offer these observations in the spirit of uncovering, and thereby transcending, the limitations of each system of beliefs. Just as we encourage others to uncover any blindness in our own work.

The need to control

The need to control our experience is pervasive. There is no arena of our lives that escapes our efforts to influence, manage and control. We attempt to manage our relationships, our careers, our thoughts, our feelings and the physical world. We try to alter our experience through participating in various courses, or with drugs, alcohol, religion, meditation, entertainment, and sex. We seek to control our staff, our students, and our children. In other relationships we seek control through more "sophisticated" and subtle means. We try to manage our careers by cultivating particular friendships. Perhaps we try to influence our clients or mold public opinion by engaging public relations experts. In obvious and covert ways we seek to control our experience and our lives. We continually attempt to modify reality so that it conforms with our ideals and expectations. We cleverly filter out the experiences we want to avoid and contrive to create the ones we desire.

If we have connected with a tradition like Taoism we might seek to influence our lives by letting go of the need to control every feature and facet of our experience. But even here our "letting go" is for a purpose. "Letting go" is a strategy - a method - designed to produce a more mellow and detached outlook on life.

Given this deep seated need to control it isn't surprising that most of the methodologies we design and use, support this need by teaching "more effective and more powerful" ways to manage and control.

However, the need to constantly organize in the name of creating a workable environment is often tiring and sometimes exhausting. We need to have our hands on the wheel, keeping everything in order and under control, for fear that we might lose our direction and autonomy. Managing, organizing and influencing produces its own stresses and conflicts.

Change for the sake of change?

Another belief that has been cultivated in recent years is that change is valuable in and of itself. Building on a belief that change is inevitable, many methodologies - both old and new - teach that we suffer because we don't accept change. We are told that if we accept change, in ourselves and others, we will be happier. We are taught to accept that "the only constant is change". But then we go further. We are invited to address our fear of change by learning how to change. We are encouraged to move "out of the comfort zone". Soon we begin to "embrace" change as a challenge out there for us to overcome. Then we go still further. We start to seek it out. We seek to do what we presently can't do. By now the word "change" has a seductive ring about it. Very soon we are constantly on the look out for a "major breakthrough" or are trying to find the next experience to knock our socks off. If we aren't growing, if we can't see change in ourselves from one year to the next, we judge ourselves negatively - which just proves to us that we must change.

In the absence of a stream of continually new experiences we can become bored, resigned and frustrated. We can lose our capacity to appreciate the smaller and simpler changes that are always around us - in our thoughts and feelings and in the world. The dance of butterflies in the grass or the experience of a gentle breeze on our skin become drowned out by the need for radical stimulation.

Rather than living in true freedom and expansiveness, we live in a state of contraction. We are constantly on the look out for something different, and forever seek to alter our experiences, rather than simply experience them, as they are. And in so doing, we lose our natural ability to be fully present, moment by moment, to who we are and what life is.

Instead of becoming free, as we'd initially intended, we just acquire more stories about who we are, where we have been and what we strive for. Our need to be somewhere different from where we are, leaves residues of dissatisfaction, tension and over time a feeling of being lost. We become players in an impossible game - telling ourselves that we can be complete and perfect, but only if we are someone different than who we are right now.

Yet, many methodologies support this drive for change. They speak into the transparent belief that fulfillment, peace and harmony depend on changing something. We get trapped in changing just for the sake of change and in so doing we lose sight of what we really want. We create methodologies which suggest that "if things are different", "if we gain such-and-such new skills", we will be happier. This entire process of believing that we must change and then going about trying to make these changes has become quite transparent. We have reached a point where it is difficult for many people to step outside of these beliefs and freshly ask: What is the real cause of stress and conflict? How can we live genuinely fulfilled lives?

The limitation of methods

We have already observed that we are automatically predisposed to control our experience in much the same way that we drive a car. We try to slow things down when we enjoy what we are doing. We apply the brakes so we can prolong what is pleasurable. When we dislike what is happening to us we try to speed up and accelerate our way through the experience. We negotiate our way through the detours of our emotions. In order to control the content and intensity of what we are experiencing we have invented a battery of methods and techniques.

We have methods for suppressing and avoiding emotions we would prefer not to experience (such as fear, vulnerability and anger) and for enhancing emotions we like to experience (such as joy, serenity and confidence). Traditional methods for doing this include ritual dance and music, sex, psychotropic drugs, prayer, yoga exercises and various meditation practices such as concentrating on the breath or reciting mantras. Contemporary enhancements include affirming preferred beliefs we want to identify with, visualization, ambience music, journaling, catharsis, breathwork and designer drugs. Certainly these methods produce change. Many of them can guarantee rapid and radical changes to our emotions and thoughts.

However, there are also limitations in the use of methods that intervene strategically and mechanically with our emotions and thoughts.

As soon as we use a method - any method - there is the question of managing its application. Firstly we need to determine what is the right or best method for us. Then we need to know if we are using it correctly. We must track its application, speculate about its effectiveness and then adjust either how or when to use it. We have to practice the method over and over so that it becomes "natural", and have to remember to use it when necessary. If we use a number of methods from different traditions we also need to determine if they are compatible with each other. When we rely on methods and strategies for fulfillment we need to constantly assess where we are and what to do next. Thus, the very methods that are designed to open us to more fulfilling dimensions of existence can have an opposite effect by making us preoccupied with the methods themselves.

We may also fail to see how formal methods and techniques can condition us so that we have less spontaneity and freedom. To the degree that we adjust our behavior so that it conforms with our chosen set of practices, we condition ourselves in their usage. In time we come to rely and depend on the methods we have learnt.

In this way methods can interfere with the natural and organic evolution of our lives, since they act as filters between what we are experiencing and what we would prefer. They consolidate a division between who we are and what we experience. Methods and techniques can also constrict us by limiting the range of experiences we can accommodate. Certain techniques will block our naked encounters with various emotions. We may lose our appreciation of the free-flowing and unstructured aspects of life and obscure a more natural source of inner harmony that transcends the use of strategic and technical methods.

In making these assessments about using formal techniques for producing change, we are not rejecting the use of such methods. We are simply noting that methods can have both a positive and negative effect on the cultivation of an alert and responsive way of living. They can both enhance and damage the emergence of a more natural and satisfying approach to life.

Blinded by our seeking

Another pattern of belief and behavior that is fostered by many contemporary methodologies is our need to search for meaning and purpose.

We are compelled to explain why we are who we are. We seek causes for our behavior, emotions, strengths, weaknesses and biases. We seek to understand the impact of our childhood, our education, our parent's problems, our past lives and more.

We constantly try to orient ourselves in terms of our past history and expectations for the future. We identify with significant stories about who we are, what we have done and where we think we are going. We offer all sorts of theories and explanations to account for why things are how they are. We search for the deeper meaning behind all that occurs.

We also create meaning and purpose as a carrot to keep us going. We talk about being "on purpose" as though there is a right career and true life path for us to discover and tread. We are in a race to discover the real meaning of our lives. Whether we turn inwards as cartographers of inner space or commit ourselves to the creation of an enlightened culture we get seduced by the romantic notions of being seekers, explorers and creators.

If we don't have a new prize to report from our latest adventures we feel small and impoverished. We seek that new program that our friends haven't yet done, a new guru, a new practice, a higher initiation, more peace and more acceptance. Or, we might believe we are further along the path and search for the present moment - as if it is something we could find and experience. And if we try to be satisfied with what we have already got, instead of achieving happiness we are left with a residue of resignation.

This search for meaning and fulfillment can disconnect us from the present moment. We find ourselves looking for something that we know isn't there, yet we continue to look as though it should be there. This occurs in all areas of our lives. In our close relationships we expect our partners to be always loving, sensitive and caring. In our careers and work we act as though we should be constantly fulfilled and rewarded. We live in the expectation that there must be more than what we have presently got. Yet our seeking for something that isn't there and our expectation that life should be different than what it is, are the very barriers that disconnect us from fulfillment and completion.

We are blinded by our seeking and fail to appreciate that we could see what we are looking for if only we stopped looking.

That there is something "to get"

A final assumption that inspires many people to develop their capacities for living fulfilled lives is the belief that fulfillment depends on gaining something. Fulfillment is seen as a function of acquiring some ineffable thing such that when we "get it" we will be fulfilled. We may think of this in terms of some knowledge, wisdom, a skill, a capacity, an experience or a way of being. But no matter how we think about it, if we don't gain this experience or understanding we won't be truly fulfilled. While we sense that this "thing" is elusive and ineffable we still hold onto the belief that if only we could read the right book, find the right teacher or attend the right course, then we would be happy and contented.

Certainly we can and do acquire valuable experiences and skills in the course of our lives that help us to manage and cope with the demands of living. But rarely do we question whether or not there is any experience or skill that could really fulfill our hopes for peace and contentment. It is unpalatable - even absurd - to think that there is nothing we need to acquire in order to be happy and complete. We reject the possibility that there isn't anything that could finally - once and for all - bring fulfillment. We can't even experiment with an approach to life in which there is nothing else we need to get, including understanding what this might mean.

Instead, we continue to believe that there is some special quality, experience or skill that will fulfill all our needs.

The Radiant Mind approach

The approach described in The Radiant Mind Course is significantly different from the methods and techniques we've been exposed to in the past thirty years. One of the main differences is that in Radiant Mind we transcend the restriction that we must be different or need to change in order to be fulfilled. Instead this work is based on the insight that peace and inner harmony arise through being genuinely open and present to the moment-by-moment flux of our experience.

For this insight we are particularly indebted to the Asian cultures which discovered and perfected a range of profound and natural approaches for cultivating a more direct and flexible experience of life.

The essence of the Asian philosophies is the cultivation of wisdom and clarity as distinct from the development of elaborate methods and techniques for changing how we think and act. The approaches that have been taught in philosophies like Taoism and the Complete fulfillment (Dzog chen) are uncontrived and uncomplicated. Their methods mirror the natural pathways that are traversed whenever we enter a state of real freedom and presence. Consequently, the methods for becoming alert and relaxed recede into the background in exact correspondence with the emergence of heightening presence and awareness. We could say that the procedures and approaches used in these practical philosophies are simply expressions of what naturally occurs whenever we authentically resolve stress and conflict, rather than keep it at bay through an act of will-power or suppression.

In this Course we have tapped the essential wisdom of centuries of practical research into the source of inner contentment, and presented this in a manner that is fully accessible to our modern lifestyle and way of thinking.

The Course is based on the insight that we experience a sense of real freedom when we don't need to avoid what we are experiencing. Whenever we are genuinely present to an experience, without any need at all to enhance or dilute its quality or texture, we immediately enjoy a unique, expansive and liberating way of being. This makes sense, for whenever we need to escape or deny our thoughts, feelings or perceptions we have an experience of being trapped and constrained. What we call intrinsic freedom stands in contrast to conditional forms of freedom. This is the experience of freedom which occurs when life is intermittently consistent with our preferences. This is a limited form of freedom because it depends on our internal and external circumstances being identical with our desires. Intrinsic freedom, on the other hand, gives us the freedom to experience whatever life offers us independently of our personal wishes and aspirations.

The experience of intrinsic freedom is also an experience of presence. It is an experience of fully accommodating what is. This is not the same as standing in the face of life's experiences. Rather, it is a totally open and spacious state of being that is, by its very nature, free of stress and conflict. It is a state of full awareness and serenity, where we are neither resisting our experience nor charging it up. This is a state in which we are aware, relaxed and able to fully embrace all experiences, emotions and thoughts without distortion or the need to escape them.

In this Course we describe how we can become disconnected from our source, from many of our feelings, thoughts and beliefs. We track the process of how beliefs form in pairs of opposites, separate in order to be distinguished from each other, and ultimately disconnect. It is our conflicting beliefs which are the source of stress and tension.

We also explain how the experience of intrinsic freedom is cultivated through harmonizing and blending the conflicting beliefs which produce stress and tension. Throughout the Course there are exercises which help you connect with your deep beliefs and recognize the beliefs which limit you. You learn how these limitations and conflicts can be harmonized at a foundational level where stress and conflict first originate.

However, learning how to release stress and conflict initially requires controlled conditions and for this reason we offer an experiential course which is based on the principles and ideas outlined in the Middle Path traditions combined with Western Psychology.

The natural environment of the Course

The Course provides a natural environment for revealing and releasing participants' fixations. This occurs because we create a psychologically and spiritually clean space in which we don't superimpose our own set of assumptions and expectations about how people should experience the course. There is very little "equipment" (i.e., tools and techniques) used in the Course as this would condition how, and what, we would experience. In fact, we progressively empty the space of embedded beliefs and procedures.

The Course is neutral in the sense that it doesn't validate, or invalidate, any particular system of belief. We don't presume what people should, or shouldn't, be experiencing what they are. Because the Course doesn't "collude" with any particular orientation, it reveals people's fixations in a clean and objective way. We don't assume that people are either ignorant or enlightened which allows participants to discover some of their most transparent (i.e., least obvious) assumptions, and fixations, about the meaning of life, and the search for happiness. The Course allows people to experience at a refined and deep level, the structures that produce the experiences of being "on track" or "off-track", in "breakdown" or "breakthrough", and so on.

The neutrality of the Course enables each person to experience the feelings of "lack" and "fulfillment" in a manner that is consistent with their own beliefs. We don't impose a philosophical, spiritual, or psychological ideology that will skew or distort how these feelings may express themselves for each course participant. In so doing, the Course is naturally adapted to people who interpret their lives from a spiritual, religious, psychological, or new-age perspective. The Course becomes a microcosmic expression for how we construct the beliefs that "this is it" and "this isn't it" on a daily basis.

In general terms, the Course works in two phases. We begin by inviting participants to follow some very simple guidelines. For example, we suggest that people become aware of, and correct, their tendency to either make hard work of the Course, or just cruise through it, as though it was a vacation. People become aware of their preference to adopt a hands-on, or hands-off approach. In terms of how people interact with each other, we simply suggest that they observe any energy or impulse to invade other people's space, or create artificial distance, either through fear of offending others, or by indulging a need for privacy. In a group setting we suggest that people neither draw attention to themselves by monopolizing group dialogues, or divert attention away from themselves through keeping a low profile.

This dimension of the work occurs very much at a "feeling" level. For example, we encourage people to become sensitive, at a bodily level, to how they are attracted towards some situations, and repelled from others. Following these gentle guidelines helps to create a lovely social environment in which people are neither defending their own beliefs, nor caving to others' opinions. These and other guidelines, produce a creative balance between sharing and privacy.

With this as a foundation, we are then able to reveal and dismantle the specific fixations that arise during the Course. Some of this disclosing and dismantling occurs in group dialogues. These dialogues work in a very precise and focused way as participants' fixations manifest in the here-and-now. As such, the content is always relevant to what people are experiencing. It isn't theoretical. Because we impose very little structure, people clearly see how they construct meaning and meaninglessness, purpose and lack of purpose, loss and gain, "not getting it" and "getting it".

The dialogues bring energy and clarity to people's experience. In between group dialogues people continue to explore and experience the ways in which they limit their lives through accepting and rejecting different feelings and ideas. Sometimes we set up specific exercises designed to dismantle our fixations around "doing" and "not doing", "getting it" and "not getting it", and so on.

In many ways the Course is like a natural koan, in that it stimulates a profound inquiry into the very structure of our existence.

If you are interested in the Radiant Mind Course a Free Video Interview is available of Peter Fenner being asked about the Course, what the unconditioned mind is and how people can tell if they are experiencing nondual awareness.