After “Exploring our real self”, OstadElahi-inPractice now carries on with its series dedicated to the study and in-depth practical approach of the Fundamentals of the Process of Spiritual Perfection: A Practical Guide in a new lab tackling “The exercise of attention-dialogue”. Bahram Elahi already referred to this exercise in La Voie de la Perfection as “one of the pillars of the process of spiritual perfection”. In the Practical Guide it is the subject of a special chapter that can be considered a reference for both theory and practice. This chapter presents numerous “recommendations for a good practice”, providing students of the “new medicine of the soul” with many guidelines resulting from years of research and in-depth experimentation.

After “One character weak point after another – delving within our unconscious psyche”, elaborated from an extract of The Path of Perfection, OstadElahi inPractice, filled with enthusiasm for the recent publication in English of the Fundamentals of Spiritual Perfection: A Practical Guide, is now launching a series of labs dedicated to the study and in-depth practical approach of this book by Bahram Elahi.

The first lab of this series opens with the words that introduce the book and that perfectly illustrate, in both form and substance, the scientific approach of a manual of medicine.

Not settling for the mere condition of a human-animal and developing the qualities that will make us truly human, such is the ultimate task facing us. The pressing challenge, though, is to prevent Bob, our “inner bonobo”, to end up taking control. So much of our behaviour already bears its mark! Practically speaking, we need to imagine the worst and take the initiative, in other words strive to take control of our self. Only on this basis can we work toward cultivating our humanity.

There is no Nobel Prize (to date) rewarding ethics research, but surely no one would dispute that in this field Ostad Elahi was perfectly learned. What is meant here by the word “learned”? Being learned is not merely knowing. A learned individual is first and foremost one who comprehends, not in theory only or through sustained reading, but as a result of self-acquired concrete knowledge. To comprehend a reality is to have concretely experienced it, to have gained first-hand knowledge of some truth. Indeed, when Ostad Elahi addresses any topic, you have a distinct sensation that he is speaking from personal experience.

The imperious self is an anti-self, i.e., a contrary force that is rebellious and systematically out to pull us away from where our real self—our soul—wants to lead us. If you want to meet with your imperious self, there is nothing simpler, all you need is to take a step towards some ethical or divine principle: help someone without expecting anything in return, hold our tongue when your impulse is to backbite or show off, try to rid your mind of negative thoughts, etc. The reaction will be immediate, and you will clearly witness the power of your imperious self in countering your attempts at such accomplishments.

As we have seen, the imperious self functions on the basis of the “terrestrial” values (ego and material interests). Its action on us could be summarized as follows: to focus our thoughts and aspirations solely toward terrestrial values and to make us forget celestial values; to put it in another way: to make us act solely according to our own material and selfish interests with no regard for others’ interests or for our spiritual dimension.

If the plural “portraits” is used here, it is to best illustrate the multifaceted and elusive figure of our inner life for the imperious self is a shape-shifting model that makes for a difficult subject for a painter. We never really know where to find it when we look for it, and we often find it where we have not been looking for it—at times in our outward behaviour, more often in our thoughts and emotions, in our most daily activities as well as in our actions that appear most spiritual and most noble. The imperious self is like a creeping rootstalk that runs underground and spreads itself out in the Self.

This is the first piece in an extended series dedicated to the practice of ethics and more specifically to the identification of the main source of our anti-ethical tendencies: the imperious self. This concept is given a precise definition in The Path of Perfection: “The imperious self is a powerful psychological energy that is harmful for the soul. This energy is continuously produced by the activity of our character weak points, resulting in anti-ethical and anti-divine impulses and desires at the level of our conscious self”.
The paradox is that the fierce resistance deployed by our imperious self against our ethical endeavours actually constitutes the necessary condition for the process of spiritual perfection to take place. In this sense it could very well be considered as our “best enemy”.

From a perspective of ethical perfection, to see ourselves in the mirrors of others is to take everything that emanates from them (actions, words, behaviour, etc.) as means to better know ourselves. Such was the general conclusion reached by Sandrine Duplessis in the first part of her inquiry. In this second part, the author gives us a few pointers as to how to concretely put this into practice.

“Know thyself”. This is certainly a beautiful maxim, but how can we expect to achieve such an end when part of ourselves is resisting so vigorously and preventing us from seeing our own faults? It is a fact: we tend to systematically overvalue ourselves and we are much more sensitive to the ethical wrongdoings of others than to our own. This two-part article by Sandrine Duplessis suggests that the solution may well lie in the problem: it is by changing our behaviour toward others that we may come to achieve a more lucid knowledge of ourselves.