I really wanted to travel the spiritual path and of course that has been a lifetime's endeavour that has introduced me to very many ideas and brilliant people, and many sidetracks that lead to nowhere as well. I soon realised that a knowledge of psychology was going to be a help in this, so I trained in Rational Emotive Psychotherapy. Nothing to do with the spiritual path, you may think, but on the contrary, I found rational thinking to be a necessary accompaniment to esoteric and mystical philosophy. Beliefs that are merely intellectual fabrications and cannot be confirmed objectively in the here and now are merely a distraction, I feel. Furthermore, beliefs and truths are quite different in nature.
Fundamental truths are really so simple yet profound that words seem a stupidity.
But getting to the truth is not so simple because of the way the mind is conditioned into reality-tunnels that obscure the truth pretty effectively. Sorting this out requires a disciplined approach that has scientific objectivity and method but also acknowledges the immense resource we each have of intuition and discernment, which may be called heart intelligence. Before she passed on, she laid the groundwork for The Insight Project , and developed the best tools I have found to overcome the barriers that obscure insight. The work consists of examining many issues and finding out what beliefs, ways of being and considerations that make up one's personality, have been imprinted by the conditioning of upbringing, the culture, traumatic experiences and all the various influences one is subject to. The identification with this material is broken so free choice is regained and also a new sense of the pure identity which underlies these layers of imprints.