Each passage in our psychospiritual journey begins with the end of an era. If we remain attached to a person or to a time, we won’t be able to go forward on the journey and we will stay imprisoned in illusion and dreams and we become sterile from the psychspiritual point of view. Before entering into the new we have to let go of the past, provoking change not only outside of ourselves but above all inside, in our souls. If we don’t process our grief, if we remain tied to painful memories, we won’t be able to go forward, we won’t fulfill our plans. If we want to live we have to have the courage to let the past go, to let die that which is no longer. If we want to be able to be born again. If we want to go deep inside ourselves to be able to be ready to undertake the mission for which we came to this earth. It’s a law we cannot escape. We can be reborn only if we have the courage to die.

Reading your emails and comments on the blog and Facebook, I understand that the posts on vocation or mission require some deepening, even if these high-tech methods don’t allow us to treat the issue in an exhaustive way. For this reason I recommend my next book, due out in the Spring and published by the Paulines, entitled, “FREE TO LOVE.” In this book I have gathered passages from some of my other books on this theme. I begin with this post and maybe then some others on the “shadow” of our personality.

First of all, I must say that if you fulfill your vocation you feel the world as friend, as if powerful energy fields were helping you. Deep down, to fulfill your vocation means participating in the permanent work of the creation of the universe. You enter into a plan of universal intelligence and wisdom, the plan of Providence. Whenever you develop your talents, God is with you. Talents, gifts, are given by God to each of us. For this God has made us unique and unrepeatable. Each of us is called to live with our own originality and in freedom, as opposed to other animals and plants that obey instinct. And besides, when a person is called to a vocation, only that person can fulfill it. This is why knowing and following your vocation is fundamentally important. The knowledge of your vocation does not come with a crash like some characters in the Bible. In reality, our vocation awaits us, no one excluded, maybe in the silence of a book, in a meeting, in the words of a friend, but also an experience of sickness or suffering, in a dismissal from work, or an accident. The revealing of a vocation can come from wherever. I am ever more convinced that it’s our vocation that chooses us. We then are free to accept and follow it, or not. Free to live, free to die. Certainly factual and concrete things reveal our vocation to us, but also thoughts, states of mind, or reflections that connect various experiences–all of these make your vocation appear clearly, as if a mysterious design has lead you to it. (exclusive excerpt from “FREE TO LOVE” (LIBERI D’AMARE ed. Paoline) only on valerioalbisetti.it

I have already written that suffering is the most fertile place from which springs the search for the deep reason for which we have come to this planet. Each of us, by definition, in the moment in which we are born, has a goal. In my vision of life, each of us is born and comes to earth because we have a mission to undertake, a vocation to follow, otherwise we would not be born.

The personal journey begins when we learn to go beyond survival, when we have recognized black and white, good and bad, and when we have understood that between them runs a clear, visible line but that, exactly for this, requires us to stay ever alert, to know how to discern, and know how to prioritize.

I do not say that the spiritual experience coincides with the psychological one, I say that the psychological experience – like an ego change—brings us to the spiritual experience. The spiritual experience is wider than a psychological one, or better, it’s different, although similar, because it contains and brings us to transcendence, the way to eternity. Its path is not direct, nor is it rigidly divided. When I completed the psychological path, the spiritual one began. But it’s the modality, that I called psycho-spiritual, that counts. In my vision, the spiritual and the psychological must be entwined. So much so that the basis of this psycho-spirituality is the continuous transformation of the ego. For me, if there is no ego transformation, there is no authentic spiritual journey. That for me, as I’ve already said, is the leit-motif of our existence. But all of this is not enough. Left alone like that, yet again, it would be a delusion of omnipotence of the ego. We need the Other, not reducible to being human, that we cannot manipulate, to whom inspire ourselves¯God. Religions for me complete this personal transformation change journey, they indicate why we must change, and the limit, there where we must transform.

If we don’t learn how to learn from our mistakes, we are condemned to repeat them forever. We must learn to recognize our mistakes because, doing so, they purify, liberate, and mature us. They make us look inside ourselves, the put us in front of ourselves to unmask our sick, neurotic and evil parts. The false awareness of ourselves must die, to be able to open truly to life, to the other, to others, because this process of unmasking is not possible, is not possible with just our own personal strength but implies help from the other, of a “you” that questions us.