Serge Beddington-Behrens - Awakening The Universal Heart: A Guide for Spiritual Activists

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Serge Beddington-Behrens, M.A.(Oxon.), Ph.D is an internationally respected spiritual educator, psychotherapist, couples counsellor and life coach who has worked in the area of healing and transformation for most of his life. He teaches a deeper approach to life based on recognising the importance of growing our heart life which in turn enables people more easily to integrate spiritual practice with psychological self-inquiry into a concrete and fundamental transformation of their lives.

Serge works with individuals, couples and groups via individual sessions, seminars and week-long spiritual retreats. Currently, the main focus of his work is exploring how people may best use their newly emerging psychological and spiritual health to become more effective change agents or spiritual activists and how corporations may transform themselves to promote a truly sustainable future for our world.

For a calendar of future seminars, retreats and talks, to make a booking and for information on how to download his CDs, either visit Serges website on www.spiritual-activism.com, contact him on infosergebb@gmail.com or ring Serge Beddington-Behrens Seminars on 07787 474283.

Copyright Serge Beddington-Behrens 2013

Serge Beddington-Behrens has asserted his right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
to be identified as the author of this work.

Umbria Press
London SW15 5DP
www.umbriapress.co.uk

Printed and bound by
Ashford Colour Press, Gosport

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9541275-8-9
E book ISBN: 978-0-9573641-8-9

Serge Beddington-Behrens
www.spiritual-activism.com

For my darling daughter Irena

Serge is a lovely man with a big heart and a correspondingly wide circle of friends. I have known him for nearly thirty years, first meeting him in 1984 when he lived in California and I was passing through promoting my new book. We went out to dinner in his open-top VW Beetle and I stayed for a few days in his house, where we had many engaging conversations. He had just completed his PhD in psychology and had co-founded an Institute for Conscious Evolution. He told me he was thinking of writing a book, and what you hold in your hands is the fruit of many years of living and reflecting on the role of the heart in spiritual and psychological practice how we can heal both ourselves and the planet to which we have done so much damage.

Two years later, I moved into his spare cottage in Gloucestershire. As Serge lived next door, over the five years I spent there we were in very close contact. I remember us both talking about how important it was to take a stand for a new way of life and of looking at the world, and both of us have tried to honour our intentions ever since. With Serge, this primarily took the form of his working as a transpersonal psychotherapist, giving inspirational lectures and teaching spiritual retreats for business executives who wanted to find their heart. In the autumn of 1986 we co-chaired the celebrations for the eightieth birthday of Sir George Trevelyan, whose writings and teachings have inspired us both and who founded the Wrekin Trust, with which we are also both closely associated. We often used to meet him for lunch in those days. It was from Sir George that Serge got the idea of a rising tide of love in the world, which is central to the theme of this important book.

In 2009, another friend, Iain McGilchrist, published his seminal book The Master and His Emissary, in which he proposed that our culture suffered from an imbalance, with too much emphasis placed on left-hemisphere analytical thinking at the expense of the right hemisphere, responsible for imaginative and creative activity. Serges diagnosis follows a similar pattern, but it is written from a much more experiential angle. With great honesty and openness, he weaves many of his own experiences and life challenges involved in trying to become himself what he calls an activist of the heart into a book greatly needed in these troubled times. His basic theme is that our planet is in great crisis today and that humanity urgently needs to grow up. We are therefore called to shift from a mindset of selfish operation based on the illusion that we are separate from our world, to one of operating holistically, so that our lives can begin to revolve around serving a deeper evolutionary purpose. Serges view is that we can only do this work effectively if we learn to open or awaken our hearts, and the book shows us how this can be done. He suggests we need to shift from being what he calls a caterpillar (old-style man) to becoming a butterfly (activist/heart man). In discussing the role that he feels the universal heart plays in this, he is building upon the work of the visionary UN assistant secretary general Dr Robert Muller, whom he also knew, and who also referred to the awakening of the Global Heart.

Serge told me he wanted to write about the universal heart because he believes that the emergence of this heart is an idea whose time has come and that more people should be introduced to it. Up until now we have heard a lot of talk about global brains and global minds, and now is the time for the world of heart to come into its own. Indeed, if we look around at certain world events that have taken place in the last decade, we can see that this is in fact the case. For instance, readers will remember the worldwide tide of sympathy for the victims of the 2004 tsunami, the millions of people who protested against the Iraqi war, the passion of the Occupy movement and the many strands of environmental activism working towards the regeneration of nature. As Paul Hawken pointed out in his book Blessed Unrest, there is an enormous amount of work being carried out by NGOs around the world, which forms a counterweight to widespread apathy, despair and hopelessness. Most recently, many of us will recall the extraordinary heart spirit of London 2012, which carried with it an enormous sense of hope, possibility and optimism. Our challenge, Serge suggests, is to learn not to close down our hearts again once the awakening moments have passed.

The first part of this fascinating book explores why the heart is so important and the huge price we pay if our hearts are closed or wounded, which leads us to feel cut off from experiencing what he calls the basic goodness of life. In the second section, Serge draws on his experiences as a shaman, healer and psychotherapist and looks at what we need to do to heal our hearts. He suggests that this is crucial if we wish to prepare ourselves for the next stage, the further cultivating of the garden of our hearts, which he explores in the third section of his book. Here it is not simply a question of awakening, but also of working at deepening our humanity, the essence of which he sees as residing inside our hearts. In this part there are fascinating chapters on how we may conduct our relationships more consciously, work more effectively with crisis and learn to forgive those who may have wounded us in some way. He also refers to the existence of spiritual help forces, and outlines ways and means that we can align ourselves with them and so receive an extra leg up in our evolutionary endeavours. Of particular interest are his personal experiences with certain spiritual masters and his experiences with ayahuasca.

Perhaps the most significant part of this book is the last section, where Serge not only looks at challenges that might lie ahead for the human race, but also at what we can all concretely do to create a better world for ourselves and our children. Here, he has a chapter on what we can do to end war and find better ways of resolving conflicts than killing each other. In a fascinating chapter on how the activist might approach the whole topic of evil, he distinguishes between obvious and non-obvious evil, suggesting that the second kind is more deadly as it doesnt initially appear to be evil and therefore we often cannot see it for what it is. He also notes that it is essential to work at integrating our own personal Shadow sides if we are to integrate marginalised and disowned areas of our society. In his last chapter, exploring the awakening of the corporate heart, he suggests that the rising tide of love is also occurring in the business world and that a new capitalism with heart is steadily arising, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of corporate corruption.