The Liberated Soul

THE LIBERATED SOUL contains the best psychospiritual wisdom available anywhere today. It comes from a century and a half of research and hard won experience by many world-class psychotherapists, philosophers, theologians and other scholars who have discovered the best ways to combine human physical and spiritual traits. In this course readers learn how to live well through a major program of some three hundred-thirty letter-sized, single-spaced pages. This is much more than theoretical information because DeVille and his sources get down into the mud and blood of human rage, anxiety, alienation, neuroticism and mental illness.

He deals with the key causes of psychospiritual disorders - with existential frustrations and our self-defeating defenses that lurk deep within every human soul -- as well as within the secular culture we people have created.

Humans are deeply subjective creatures who experience many mind-boggling difficulties because we are enchanted, metaphysical souls inhabiting finite and often frustrated mammal bodies. As Jesus taught his disciples, few of us learn how to manage our creature-self paradox -- flesh and spirit, in ways that empower our souls and bring us self-transcending liberation.

In THE LIBERATED SOUL, you can learn powerful concepts from many psychospiritual giants, complete self-focus exercises and master major projects to discover why life is beset with horrors; much anxiety, self-deception, depression, alienation and rage.

Better yet, you shall learn how to manage the excessive repression, avoidance and denial that develops within anxious or existentially frustrated souls, leading to serious emotional complications that keep people in bondage, because of our embattled psychological and spiritual traits. You can learn how to -- exorcise many anxieties from your life, avoid keeping deadly, debilitating secrets from simmering within and win your soul's liberation. If you or a loved one finds it difficult to live a joyous life, feeling defeated, depressed and frustrated because of life's pressures, unable to maintain peaceful, love-filled relationships in a satisfying life-style, this course teaches you many powerful attitudes, activities and relationships needed to make life deeply meaningful.

DeVille researched and developed THE LIBERATED SOUL for thoughtful women and men who seek psychospiritual freedom for themselves, their families, congregations and their communities. Through this existential or life-style approach to soul liberation, the author teaches women and men they are first and foremost spiritual beings for whom a secular, nihilistic, narcissistic life-style is invariably self-defeating. He reports on the best ways of making life come out right through spiritually mature, self-aware choices.

This course of study isn't simplistic; it isn't something hurriedly cobbled together, and obviously, living well in our era of complexity and relentless change isn't easy. Soul liberation requires both psychological knowledge and philosophical wisdom! To begin with, you must understanding several astonishing spiritual breakthroughs that many of DeVille's outstanding existential scholars reached consensus about.

FIRST - THE ATHEIST'S ENIGMA
As an ancient African-American gospel song laments, life is indeed filled with complications and sorrows for everyone. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen -- Nobody knows but Jesus. At times life can become an unmitigated horror as the world slowly but surely converts every plant that sprouts and every creature that is born into fertilizer to feed future doomed generations. We really are finite beings adrift in a dangerous world, beset consistently by the tragic human quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death. George Santayana, the brilliant Harvard philosopher wrote; Life is neither entertainment nor a feast but a predicament to be resolved in the face of enormous difficulties. Most of us do indeed live out at least some portions of our lives in quiet desperation. We are all caught up in some frustrations of life much of the time.

During a half century of psycho spiritual research, this consensus emerged in the writings scholars like Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Laura Perls, Abraham Maslow Melanie Klein and many others. Some of them started as agnostics or atheists who like Sigmund Freud thought God was a security myth, religion a fraud, worship and prayer naively subjective and faith, hope and love meaningless illusions. Nevertheless, as they matured personally and professionally, when everything psychological had been researched, after they'd reached the limits of psychotherapy, the incredible insights in the following paragraph appeared regularly in many of the most influential scholars' lectures, therapy sessions and books.

To mature beyond neurotic anxiety, to cope with existential alienation, to live purposefully and win consistent satisfaction, each person must develop a faith as if God were real. We scholars can find no God -- religion probably panders to human weakness, prayer and worship are frauds, Nevertheless, to avoid crippling our souls, we must assume that God exists and offer devotion to this myth because doing so gives us a crucial sense of security in a dangerous world We can then live with the illusions of faith, hope and love that is essential for a meaningful lift.

Oh my -- how wondrously droll, how deeply self-serving, how terribly convoluted! Fortunately, there is a much better way, for according to William of Occam, with all factors being equal, the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best one. Soren Kierkegaard, the always brilliant and forever relevant godfather of modem psychology, the most equal of DeVille's great authors, along with Ernest Becker, saw life more clearly than most. The Danish philosopher of the First Industrial Revolution, when writing about satisfaction reported; the only way we humans can find contentment in a commercial society is through a self-transcending faith in God that lifts us beyond a fearful, frustrated and meaningless existence.

SECOND - THE CONTRITE SPIRIT
The next astonishing consensus to emerge from DeVille's brilliant psychospiritual giants is the necessity of personal humility in the deliverance of one's soul.

To resolve our spiritual difficulties, to succeed in our quest for liberation, we must successfully pass through the major emotional crisis of human liberation. During this conflict, the soul with its unconscious scar tissue; repressed, anxious, subjective and frozen at the core of our being, must surrender itself. Selfishness must yield to generosity. We must mature beyond the immature attitude of I - Myself Alone. The seeker after freedom, to use St. Paul's concepts, must nurture a contrite attitude in order to repent and abandon much personal selfishness. In psychoanalytic terms, the self must sacrifice the ego in order to become free of its tyranny. Only after we have removed our emotional armor, have matured beyond egoistic self-deception and often gone past the assistance psychotherapy can give us to connect consciously with God, can we find deliverance. We have too many primitive homosapien traits to break free in our own strength. We need assistance to mature beyond our posturing and pretension, past our repressed killer-ape paranoia and nagging anxieties, beyond our compulsive defenses. We must abandon such baggage to escape through the prison bars we ourselves have erected for ego protection against our anxiety and guilt.

Our search for freedom via the repentance of our failures, with sincere contrition, creates several crucial questions to be answered as we seek liberation from our homosapien anxiety and rage through faith and self-awareness. We must ask ourselves;

How can I end my self-defeating ego defenses, remove my emotional and cultural armor to become the loving parent, supportive spouse and faithful friend I yearn to be?

How shall I courageously stand in my quaking and bleeding nakedness -- my ego screaming for esteem regardless of who is abused, without being overwhelmed by the cruelties of life?

How can I, a mere mortal already living under a death sentence, in a prison of my own making, successfully make my way through this confusing maze of suffering, rage guilt and death that is the universal tragic quartet of existence?

BENEFITS

1. Each human life is an uneasy joining of selfish mammalian traits from our primordial past and generous self-aware virtues through which our creature selves live reasonably well together. These dissimilar elements are often in conflict within the soul and generally in opposition to many cultural requirements. The reader will learn how we humans combine emotional and spiritual traits with more or less success.

2. Each person automatically assumes himself or herself to be at center-stage of life's drama. We all see I - MYSELF-ALONE, as the key player to whom all others should defer, although while growing up with other narcissists, most persons learn to repress this selfishness somewhat. The reader will learn how our narcissistic yearning for possessions, power, prestige and pleasure creates enormous personal and social problems -- up to and including the devastating 20th century wars and cold wars.

3. Each of us is given this marvelous gift of life -- a big red apple for our pleasure. Unfortunately, the gift has a worm at the core - the tragic quartet of guilt, rage, suffering and especially death - and with the quartet, the death-dread that nags at each person, creating such pain that we repress it in order to find a bit of satisfaction from life. The reader will learn how our genetic death-dread, our unconscious fear of annihilation, our ravening creature self, complicates almost every human attitude, activity and relationship.

4. We can help one another live meaningful lives by being supportive, but in the last analysis, each person has to make the crucial decisions that lead to psychospiritual wholeness or to fragmentation. Unfortunately, each society conspires with its myths and self-deceptions to conceal the nature of healing and health. The reader will learn how to better take personal responsibility for deliverance, in much the same manner as an addict making healing choices.

5. Although the early psychologists like Freud had many brilliant insights, we have now learned much more that can help women and men make life satisfying consistently. Of course, everything we think and do takes shape within our brains, our incredible computer atop our shoulders. The reader will learn how to apply psychoanalytic concepts in ways that make sense and deliver souls from captivity today.

6. There is little doubt that all persons are influenced by persons with more power, wealth or prestige than they can focus on living wisely and well. This makes us vulnerable sexually, financially and spiritually to users and abusers who care little about others in their quest for personal esteem. The reader will learn to recognize the motivation of manipulators and to avoid and deflect them without becoming a lonely soul.

7. Humans are all subjective to the core, living their lives with the illusions that make our suffering, guilt and death less difficult to tolerate but also cause many serious problems over the long run. The reader will learn that others are not necessarily lying as they see things from a self-serving position, but everything important must be understood to come from our self-serving subjectivity.

8. Each person must accept the hidden paradox within, come to grips with the creature-self that combines both emotional and spiritual traits which remain in conflict much of the time. The reader will learn that the orthodox quest, the sexual quest and the service quest cannot over the 10nK run deliver one from the shackles forged by our childhood attempts to avoid pain and to fill our lives with self-esteem.

9. A common mistake made by many persons is to assume that psychology and religion are incompatible. Actually they are sisters under the skin for they both well up out of the same human needs. The reader will learn how to avoid either/or choices, to understand how the roots of psychotherapy and worship are woven together within each human soul.

10. While we have many neurotic traits in our complex and threatening world, there are several major forms of mental illness. Each one comes from a failure of courage that causes the sufferer to miss finding meaning in his or her life. The reader will learn to better manage the problems found in schizophrenia, depression, sexual distortions and several other forms of emotional illness.

11. We all hate to surrender some aspects of our precious souls in order to connect supportively with others. We all yearn for the assurance of a conscious continuance of the soul that makes death less painful. The reader will learn how we can mature beyond prestige, pleasure, power and possessions through faith, hope and love as expressed by supportive souls we love.

12. We all want to make our satisfying activities and relationships last as long as possible. To do this we must mature psychospiritually, selecting key tasks and relationships to which we commit ourselves. The reader will learn that the effort spent in living wisely seldom frustrates us but leads to more and more rewarding attitudes and activities.

13. Because our homosapien anxieties and the pressures of a secular society are too great to manage without a fear of life and a dread of death, we seek help from many sources including mentors, therapists, ministers and politicians. The reader will learn how the ultimate source of assistance is God from whom every aspect of existences eventually flows.

14. Draw together the major points into a meaningful whole. Lasting satisfaction through psychospiritual health occurs when we live at peace with the creature-self within. This occurs only as we mature spiritually and transcend narcissism, when we civilize our egos, and develop a faith in God that creates within our souls the life enhancing elements of a covenant faith.

Warmly,

Jard & Roberta DeVille