The experience of life can be graceful, tender, sweet and filled with beauty. At the same time, it can often turn aggressive, demanding, stressful and frightening. Life, which includes not only the biological and physical but the phenomenon of human culture as well, has many faces – but it is clearly its occasional unwelcome appearance as an overwhelmingly intense and forceful event that can easily drive us to aversion and to the wish to withdraw altogether or even hide in some dark corner within our inner world.
This aggressive appearance, which reminds us time and again – in case we have forgotten or simply have wished not to remember – that life’s nature is a constant friction, is of course the root cause of our underlying resistance to the human experience. Many feel that they cannot find sufficient stamina and immunity to endure this stressful race and from this sense of inherent weakness and fragility, develop a yearning to retire.
The psychic and spiritual component we all need: “True Inner Power”
Inner power is the feeling that we are, in essence, unbreakable. It is the sense that, in us, there exists a self which does not depend on life’s empowerments and weakenings. Its power does not desperately derive from enhancing external events nor does it become weaker as a result of frustrating and limiting events. Without such an inner, non-dependent self, one could not even consider the possibility of consenting to the ceaseless pressures of human experience.
For this reason, I developed “Power Psychology”: a psychological system which demonstrates how greatly vital this component of inner power is for psychic and spiritual integration and wholeness. This system shows in detail the different ways our psyche, in the absence of this inner power, forms complex structures which are solely meant to conceal this lack. But “Power Psychology” is not merely theory-based: its true purpose is to practically guide us towards the full development of this ingredient.
Rule No. 1: Will is essential
What is the reason for the painful absence of inner power within the human psyche? The answer is simple: the constant suppression of our willing center leaves us eventually weak and vulnerable. In essence, will is one’s ceaseless drive to become more than one already is; it is the drive that guides us to expand ourselves through further experience, achievement and knowledge. When we manage to fulfill our will, we experience a deeply satisfying sense of power and self-expansion. However, since culturally and psychologically we prefer to hide away, even from ourselves, that there is indeed such a will pulsating in us, we end up trapped in the feeling that we are just not strong enough to withstand life’s processes, with all its challenges, pressures and difficult crises.
The willing center is a major center of perception and experience in human life, and it plays a major role in psychic health. Ideally, it serves as a highly positive source of energy from which we draw our power and capacity to become fully active participants in life and the world. Of course, the willing center might be, in its undeveloped and untransformed state, a source of conflicted psychic activity in which one’s inner world constantly battles with life. Yet, this undeveloped, distorted activity is certainly not a good enough reason to suppress this much needed center of experience.
We suppress a certain element within us only as long as we cannot grasp its significance – only when we do not know how to positively make use of it as an integral and harmonious part of our being as a whole. In this sense, not knowing how to turn the willing center into a contributing component in our psyche and how to transform its activity into a blessed state of unbreakable self is our true problem.
First and foremost, we ought to learn how to harness our will for the sake of building an unbreakable self within us. We acquire the genuine ability to master ourselves, our thoughts and our emotions, and attain an integrative system in which our willing force is unified and therefore capable of solidly facing each and every crisis or challenge.
Rule No.2: You are not a victim
For as long as we do not acknowledge the vital existence of our willing center, a complex psychic process will take place instead, leading us, through defenses and concealments, to believe that we are mere “victims” of life. We witness this phenomenon over and over again in psychotherapeutic processes – not only in clients, unfortunately, but more importantly, in the attitude of many therapists who promote “victimhood” as a so-called understanding of human psyche. In this way, rather than being genuinely rehabilitated as active participants of life, many regress to an even deeper condition of weakness and fragility.
The commonly shared psychological concept of our era states that the pains and hurts we have accumulated as a result of all the “bad things” that others did to us lie at the heart of the human unconscious. These pains and hurts are supposedly the root-cause of our psychic suffering. In simple words, we are, at least to a certain degree, life’s victims, psychically shaped by external aggression. But how could such a vision of the human psyche ever lead us to mature towards full consent to the human experience? Of course, it could not – if anything, it would only be our eternal impediment to the very possibility of profound maturation.
Suppressing our willing center in this way comes at the great price of leaving us weakened and even impotent. Recognizing its vital and positive existence in us, on the other hand, leads eventually to the healthy feeling that we can actually participate in life – since we find in us an active center which has always been driven to do so. Not only are we not victims but we are also energetically propelled by willing as a part of life’s and the cosmos’ very own dynamic. In many respects, life is the activity of will – cosmic will so to speak – and this will is life’s source of endless energy and drive to unfold.
All we have to do is know how to unravel the psychic complications of our unconscious willing, which made us cover it up with thick layers of concealment and compensation. We need to come into direct contact with it, and then begin to guide it inward through practices of inner power so that we can turn unbreakable. Such an unbreakable state is the only genuine form of psychological strength.
If you wish to delve deeply into the theory of Power Psychology, read The Journey To Inner Power
If you wish to practice Power Psychology in your daily life, read Indestructible You
