This view has been practically tested through the ages and can only be definitively proven through personal experience. The wish to change oneself does not, however, necessarily mean that the will is present. This indicates that further information and insight is required to create a strong enough conviction before self-changes can be secured.

Self-transformation will sooner or later call for the clarification, in one way or another, of the entire basis for one's life and how it is viewed, that is - one's most basic beliefs and attitudes towards life. There is an increasing tendency in some progressive Western psychological thinking and psychotherapeutic work towards this view. Many ideals for personal development can be found from one culture to another and even from one person to another within the same sub-culture, and no one can prescribe in general which is best or would be most helpful to everyone, since it will vary greatly with background and personality. It is important when seeking answers to the bigger questions and adopting some new outlook or ideas, to consider what practical social and other effects it will have in daily living over a long period. This can be a matter of trial and error as one goes along, but the danger of entertaining some belief or ideology which brings only minimal positive consequences for one's actions and behaviour is ever-present and can amount to little more than escapism.

MOTIVES AND GOALS OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION

Self-transformation requires clear initial understanding of why it is desirable. The goal must be explainable in some way before a person will even begin on the journey. In all forms of personality development requiring efforts there is often an inherent difficulty: to find and sustain motivation towards something one has not yet experienced oneself.

Each approach to self-transformation will always represent but one method among others. No more than a social policy or political ideology can be said to be absolutely valid for everyone can any therapeutic theory be shown to be definitively applicable for all people everywhere and at all times. But though problems vary from place to place and needs differ through time, certain fundamentals are always needed. The main headings of most of the following chapters indicate some central concepts in self-transformation, such as self-esteem, self-perception, self-discipline, self-fulfilment and self-investigation.

There is no attempt here to present a systematic programme for self-transformation, not least because the task obviously extends eventually to include all aspects of life and also because there are so many ways, means directions and starting points... all depending on the present psychic state or status of any individual. The following is therefore to be taken more as an outline, than as a body of established knowledge... and a brief one at that. The meaning and substance of self-realisation, even in a relative sense, simply cannot be 'summed up' in a few chapters of a book. The prerequisites and practices involved are many and dissimilar.

Self-transformation does not exclude by any means the likelihood that others can be of therapeutic help and in positively influencing the process of personal change. The insight and caring of a helper can, of course, provide a decisive opportunity and a stimulus. But one person cannot simply be changed much by another, and certainly not without compliance, self-help and the growth of self-knowledge. The disciplines and techniques that have been developed for human self-improvement, or healing of the mind or psyche, can at best only contribute towards the many steps and stages in a person's own gradual lifelong process of self-realisation, which depends upon one's own self-inquiry and activity.

Some therapeutic theories and methods build on assumptions that are false, unfruitful or even unethical. Therapeutic systems can also be a mixture of sound and unsound aspects. The values they express are often influenced by the type of client for which the therapy is designed, the kind of problems on which it focuses and the level of improvement to which it aspires.

Amid the disintegration of social, cultural and religious unities in modern society along with the 'collapse of values', many professional psychologists have, whether more or less willingly, tried to fulfil needs that were previously filled by the priesthood. They stepped into a vacuum due to widespread scepticism about religion, churches and the clergy.

Those who, for better and worse, depend for their employment upon the mental illness of clients seemingly unable to help themselves may hold back from taking the full consequences of our premise, that all self-change comes only from oneself. The very idea tends to undermine the authority of supposed 'experts'. As with medicine, the aim should really be to make doctors and therapists superfluous, but professional interests may object to this.

Those people who are so unfortunate as to be diagnosed as mentally ill usually enter a system heavily backed by the entrenched interests of a multi-billion dollar drugs industry which funds medical research activities. However, those who cannot learn of themselves and understand the benefits of self-transformation, or practice it by their own efforts, will alas evidently remain a very large part of the population in the foreseeable future. Through the understanding and practice of self-transformation, psychologists can benefit both personally and in helping the psychic sufferers under their care.

VALUES AND SELF-TRANSFORMATION IN THERAPY

In counselling, therapy and related support activities the values 'behind' actions and observable facts are vital. This applies as much to the 'therapist' as to the 'client'! The role of values can hardly be overrated in the life of people. They apply as much to self-transformation as to counselling and to the therapeutic support and treatment of others, even those with serious behavioural disturbances. A therapist without an appreciation of human values in practice will probably be more likely to harm than help. To be fundamentally confused about values is to be unbalanced oneself and hence greatly handicapped in understanding the problems of others or the human psyche generally

Values are expressed in practice through value-judgemental acts. What may seem to be a bad act from one person's viewpoint (eg. a counsellor or therapist) may have to be re-evaluated if it is established that it was done with good intentions, misguided or ineffective though their effect was. Establishing the facts and values (or anti-values) actually operating in any interaction is mostly far from simple, for it involves complexes of circumstances, related events and subsequent consequences, as well as reactions to them. The question of the extent of awareness, understanding and intelligence of the agents in carrying them out has also to be evaluated.

Equally much depends upon the level of insight achieved through practical application of the human values by therapists or psychologists in their own behaviour and experience. Those who themselves act contrary to values professed or implicitly held can hardly be very effective. Without long personal experience, informed by intelligible and valid 'theory', attempts to understand others' personal or social conflicts of values usually suffer from subjectivity and alienated general ideas. Such maturity very seldom comes in the first several decades of life.

Many personal difficulties that would today be regarded as 'psychological' may themselves consist in - or result from - confusion of values. This mostly arises when one cannot decide how to act due to uncertainty as to rights and wrongs of a matter, or as to which value might or should apply in a given situation. Unsolved moral conflict between values and anti-values (i.e. good and ill) leads to inconsistencies of thought, word and action, which is psychically destabilising. This has consequences for the development of character, especially in the formative years of life. Such an obvious general fact, long recognised by civilised peoples, has been neglected or peripherialised in most modern psychological thought.

Many difficulties that are referred to psychologists are closely related to the confusion or lack of values in the social environment or in life generally. Such anti-value problems range from intensely disturbing experiences such as paedophilia or parent alcoholism to the psychic acclimatisation to falsehood, violence and loose living by much watching of TV. The complex interrelations of causes and motives in all such questions can only be properly understood at the personal level, and are clearly not done justice by general statistical methods or opinion surveys.

There can arise a conflict between clearly-held values. For example, some feel that an animal in great pain which is bound to die ought to be killed. In some cultures, respect for life itself is held so high that mercy killing is looked upon as wrongful meddling in matters of life and death beyond our competence. Here, the values loving sympathy and non-violent conflict. Similarly, to tell the truth to a death-squad about whether one is sheltering their next victim brings truth into conflict with the value of non-violence and love. To resolve such dilemmas satisfactorily - and thousands of similar but less well-defined instances - a certain level of training in ethical thought and problem-solving behaviour is required. This does not simply all come of itself instinctually or intuitively, for it is mostly learned behaviour, whether through imitation of role models or through rules, examples and education.

People are held responsible for their decisions, whether by law or not. There can be no clear set answers for all circumstances and neither is there any ultimate court of judgement available to absolve one from making the choice apart from one's own conscience. Human values themselves are the most ultimate 'court of appeal' to which we can apply, through reason, sympathy, understanding and conscience.

THE CRADLE OF SELF-UNDERSTANDING

The particular cradle of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs into which each of us is born is, for nearly all of us, that of our parents. This soon becomes roomier to include our schoolteachers, religious instructors, authors of books or films, friends and so forth. Some attitudes and opinions are absorbed naturally and without noticing, as instinctively as breathing, before the mind can become aware of them or reflect on their validity. However, the developing child's mind is seldom closed to competing ideas, some break in upon us as if by force and confront others that have sneaked in like a thief in the dark. The mental conflicts we must undergo in a mixed environment do not usually last so long, there is so much to hear about, discover, see, investigate... the mind remains mostly open and undecided as to what is the truth in most questions.

For most of our youth, at least from the first maturity of childhood up until the end of the teenage period before adult worldly experience begins to make its impact, we remain almost entirely unformed as to opinions and are not very judgemental. Inwardly, we are tentative in our beliefs about most people, the world and the cosmos... even though some may feel a need to affect knowledge and certainty outwardly. Lacking knowledge, it is hard to make up a fixed opinion and close the mind off against contenders, unless we have been formed wrongly or driven into a false identity by excessive destructive circumstances and, say, have built up everything on a fixed idea.

All this is natural innocence taking a form of unbiassed interest in everything and its possible meanings. Many fresh, confusing, fascinating or distracting events and possibilities arise. Open-mindedness and tolerance to every kind of person and ideology are a real danger if practised without discrimination, which means without the guidance of some genuine higher form of knowledge. If taken too far in the wrong direction, there is no end to the mischief one can open oneself to. Nor is there any end to the progress we can make in life if forearmed with the correct mental protection that comes through trustworthy spiritual guidance.

In the global society with its intermingling of all cultures, faiths and peoples through information, migration and travel, it is no longer likely that any set world-view or orthodox religious belief will smooth our way. The unchallenged, assumed ideas that were imbibed while in the figurative social crib - the particular traditional religious beliefs or anti-spiritual secular attitudes that one has adopted as part of a family, group or society - can turn out to be a burden or even a destructive instrument when the world has to be faced alone and adult life begun. However, there lies a danger in showing understanding towards practices and persons who one has no genuine understanding of, which is why guidance is important. Protection of one's own best destiny is certainly not automatic, for it is requires seeking the right approach to it.

Protection of the growing psyche depends much on the thoughts one absorbs and cherish and thus also on the company one seeks. Those who genuinely aspire to a life that is useful to humanity for communal service and such higher aims are generally a better influence than those who are concerned only with personal ambition, self-satisfaction, money-making and success in the eyes of the world. The feed-back one receives from others is a very important formative influence in the earlier stages of life and at least until adult maturity. It helps us to form our values and lays the basis for self-changes.

PERSONAL INVESTIGATION AND TEACHINGS

Self-investigation of some sort begins in various ways early in life. The normal outgoing interest and extraversion of youth, the events met under most normal circumstances and reactions to them, usually call for some self-examination. However, this seldom has an inner cause and an inward goal. C.G. Jung observed that the process of inward self-discovery is usually seriously begun after the midpoint in life. The concrete aims and encounters which expand one's worldly knowledge in youth is only later replaced by the wider motivations of the mind and heart in relation to the human soul or spirit, the cosmos and - for those who prefer to think so - to God. One aspect of this process is the search for deeper understanding or wisdom.

Earlier, in generalising about understanding as a human process, a large and crucial area of the human geography was sketched. A broad grasp of some subject can, however, still remain at the superficial level. When we speak of the depth of someone's understanding, we usually mean more than that it is wide-ranging. Depth of vision arises through insight, not so much through broad-minded interest in all things or a chasing down of every kind of fact in science and art. Insight hardly occurs where there has not been deep concentration and sustained effort to understand oneself in relation to everything. Insight is a product of mental or psychic reflection and thus depends on self-knowledge.

When not confined to systematised disciplines like sciences, the mind's considerations are so varied and many that one can only reply on personal judgement. This applies even to deciding on the quality and truth of all forms of testimony, whether personal, legal, scientific or other. The individual's personal evaluation is still always of prime importance.

The insight into human nature that comes of self-knowledge also reflects one's knowledge of others and vice-versa. When a person's environment is such as to hinder the development of this natural propensity freely to know and to understand, the consequences can be very serious for the development of personality and, inter alia, for the society. History demonstrates that the repression anywhere, through whatever means, of the universal human propensity to want to understand easily leads to stunted personalities and ill-functioning societies. Examples are the strict confinement of women, as practised in some Islamic sects or depriving children of schooling through making them work like adults.

Unless we personally possess or integrate knowledge through intuitive experience, backed up by personal discovery and observation, it is little better than conjecture. Understanding arises only to the degree that we achieve control of our own mental processes. Even when not really understood, knowledge can be passed on to others by a clever sort of parroting, yet only when it resonates fully with one's own experience when it is penetrated by the reviewing mind's eye, can it bear the conviction of immediate truth. Everyone can gain the ability to reflect comprehensively and to contemplate free of personal interests.

Having the self-reliance to learn from personal experience and effort, of finding out for oneself and relying on one's own judgement can protect one against many a futile belief and keep one off the trail of red herrings. However, no more than we rediscover all human knowledge by our own experience, can we reach spiritual realisation without having a true teaching to follow. Obviously, the sooner we find such a guideline, the greater the likelihood of progressing far.

The maxim that 'you are your own best teacher' reflects an ancient conception that all that is within, is without and all without within. That our conscience and higher discrimination reflect a consciousness which not entirely self-generated but which seems to be inherent to the (normal?) human mind. This opens for intuition arising within oneself. This view implies, however, that there are deep within us and unbeknown to us, potentialities of consciousness, which is the goal of many so-called 'spiritual' teachings and disciplines.

There is not only a divergence between different world cultures; it increases the more closely one examines doctrines and beliefs within any given culture. Different models of knowledge are always jostling and competing. Doctrines once sent to oblivion sometimes suddenly re-emerge to challenge the conventional wisdom that replaced them, as is being increasingly seen today in science, philosophy and theology. This again demonstrates a well-known fact: what at any time may be regarded as a 'correct understanding' in society, even by all the recognised experts in any subject, need not actually be true or adequate. Opposing viewpoints still continually divide almost every religion, philosophy and science into schools or sects and, as discussed earlier, the same applies to psychology.

Even false beliefs and misguided doctrines invariably contain some truth and goodness. There is always a measure of the proverbial 'method even in madness'. The task of unifying understanding is ever to extract the grains of truth from the biassed account and the distorted theory and to discard the husks. Understanding is a process of gleaning whatever remains whole after the clash of opposing viewpoints, thesis contra antithesis, and after the analytical picking-apart of theoretical systems of error. The truth content has continually to be extracted and given new expressive form suitable to the changing world, without losing the universal essence. That is the aim for unity in understanding at the intellectual level, while on that of trans-global understanding the aim is mutual respect and gradual reconciliation in the best interests of everyone.

Great religious scriptures, national works of literature, scientific and philosophical treatises are often all so different in conception and outwardly conflicting as to be impossible of direct comparison. Yet our deeper intuition shows us that mostly the same essential values and insights very often underlie and somehow come to expression in them through their very dissimilar forms. This points toward any teaching that is non-discriminatory, inclusive and so truly universal.

Where understanding lacks, the thoughts, words and actions of the human being are in conflict. The consequences of this is disharmony and further conflict. Understanding is above all what aims at comprehension of the underlying unity in all things, seeking to penetrate to the universal and unitary kernel of truth in divergent cultures and their products. This gives increasing peace of mind, more balanced judgement, more harmonious action and good quality of life.

Though the pure essence of the traditional religions express the same truth, it is by no means easy to separate this essence from the mass of accumulated historical detritus of mistaken interpretations. The symbolic is often taken naively as literal fact. Such theological and linguistic confusions or culturally-blinkered and falsified doctrines have been incorporated into religions, then absolutised on the authority of a Church or the followers of the particular prophet as being 'the only true word of God'.

Therefore, a teaching is required today which concentrates the essence of spiritual living and does not stray dogmatically beyond what is or can be known. Such a teaching simply must, to be spiritually relevant today, be universal in its embrace of all peoples and beings. It must assert the values of love, truth and goodness in action as the absolute prerequisites of any kind of spiritual protection and personal progress towards the ultimate.

Perhaps the chief problem for a spiritual renaissance in our era lies in many new forms of false understanding and quasi-religiosity. The centuries-long degeneration into dogmatism and empty rituals in established religions throughout the modern world and the weakening, confusion and relative loss of values that has accompanied it have left a spiritual vacuum. A great sense of loss in the population, combined with the intensity of the globalised pressures and threats arising through massive industry and racing technology, is being catered to by literally thousands of supposedly new schools of pseudo-spiritual thought, much of which is just a new type of business. The spiritually deprived who now look beyond a narrower kind of materialistic and scientific world-view often grope for any kind of short cut to personal happiness and peace of mind. Consequently they form a profitable and very big market for all manner of inferior 'product', any so-called 'spiritual technique', the common feature of many being that they purvey some form of 'ego-massage'. Some temporary benefits may result for person suffering anxiety, failure and self-doubt, the practical and ethical fundaments of spiritual work are often supplanted with self-centered efforts to storm the portals of spiritual power.

The task is to cut through the tangled overgrowth of semi-traditional beliefs and competing ideologies of every kind so as to find a safe guiding star... a clear, intelligible and noble teaching that sensibly inspires faith in what is beyond mundane appearances, states the goal of human endeavour in the cosmos and shows practical ways towards it. It's authority should not rest on the blind belief in certain historical facts, but in the force of faith it inspires through the goodness and power of its vision, the clarity, consistency and truth of its explanations, and on the spiritual advancement that comes of following its practices and precepts.

The world literature on personal development and spiritual discipline provides many hypotheses on how acting upon certain values produces certain results. These processes are not only or mainly forms of training or techniques to be practised only at set times and places. Self-transformation is only real or secure insofar as it is permanently sustained throughout the gamut of human situations. The study of such literature can be useful to provide a background on with which better to understand and oneself.

Eventually, the only solution to the question, when diverse deliberations about a teaching can get one no further, is to plunge in and begin the process of exploration and self inquiry. This is the manner in which it really makes sense to speak of 'finding out for oneself'. This usually requires some time free from pressing concerns and can be done in a wide variety of ways, such as joining a suitable conversation or counselling group for the purpose, meditating, writing a diary or a self-biographical account and so forth.

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE IN SELF-TRANSFORMATION

Three successive phases can be distinguished in any process that aims at the improvement of a situation in such areas as medicine, mental therapy or social developmental work. These are called the gnosis, the diagnosis and the prognosis.

Gnosis refers to the present time and consists in an informed description of the condition in question and the relevant circumstances that accompany or relate to it.

Diagnosis refers to the past and consists in an analysis, in the widest sense, of the causes of a condition. It will thus include previous events or facts as well as the previous actions and their motivations and purposes that have led to the condition being investigated. Diagnosis is an attempt to define the root of any problems or dilemmas.

Prognosis originally meant a forecast of future developments, as if these could be known in advance on the basis of a diagnosis. Here, in connection with the future of an individual psyche it must rather be thought to refer to alternative future choices and avoidance, including any plan of action for dealing positively with the condition, or one might perhaps say the policy for improving a situation. In respect of transformational psychology, the prognosis includes how to inspire or motivate towards self-improvement.

These three 'phases' are logically connected as relating to present (gnosis), past (diagnosis) and future (prognosis), they are seldom if ever fully separable from one another in practice. There is a deep underlying reason for this too. The past no longer exists as such, only as a present consequence and the future is yet-to-be, though it is 'contained' in present existence, as a potentiality. It follows from this that, of the three phases, the gnosis is the most important and must always be at the focus of understanding. Any attempts at self-examination or therapy that fail in keeping this in mind will be practically fruitless to the same extent.

The Present and Gnosis To emphasise the term 'gnosis' beside the well-know terms 'diagnosis' and 'prognosis', attention is brought to the immediate present, to the facts that apply at the time and the experienced nature of actual problems or challenges which are experienced as real, as opposed to merely hypothetical or speculative. The inclusion of a 'gnosis' phase is to ensure that theory and diagnosis do not enter the picture prematurely and hence that a proper hearing is given initially to a person's own account. At the same time, interest is continually focused on the actual personal encounter between psychologist/therapist and client/patient and the importance in human terms of the interactions between them.

There is a tendency for both 'patients' or clients of therapists to become much involved in what has previously occurred or what is likely to occur or will possibly happen. This is often due to the theory and practice of the therapist. It is natural enough in some respects, yet it is very easily exaggerated, and for a whole range of reasons. This is one of the major challenges the mind sets, by its vary nature, for everyone to overcome... the undue predominance of past feelings and ideas over present vision and possibilities. Mind or thought control is part of the solution to these preoccupations, which may in fact be shown - with persistence and improved self-understanding - to be the frequent solution to the original 'problems' themselves. Mental problems are, after all, largely created by - or sustained by - the mind! The mind can therefore function equally well in their solution or dissolution. But this presumes right understanding followed by sufficient right action.

Tests of non-correspondence between thoughts, words and deeds and of imbalance due to conflicting or excessive attachments can help one understand diversion from practical actuality towards non-relevant and unrealistic behaviour. Such tests bring attention to the 'gnosis', the situation and circumstances that generally pertain at the time, which serve as a starting point for considering past and future relations.

The Past and Diagnosis As to the person's past: at a certain phase in life most persons make one or more very basic 'existential' choices about one's identity and aspirations, such as about what or who to become, how one wishes to live, which principles to follow, what to believe or not etc., and some of these may, whether through habitual accumulation or through self-fulfilling experience based on the original course taken, become virtually irrevocable. Even at the level of thought alone, tendencies can eventually become so binding that only a major personal upheaval may hope to alter their course. Major changes of mind are certainly not frequent in most person's lives. The consequences of previous 'life decisions' can have become so familiar or subliminally habitual that they have either been forgotten or their significance for one's present situation and behaviour is obscured.

A person's past is known directly in that person's memory. The past, from the subject's viewpoint, is a product both of the processes of remembering and of forgetting. From a supposed 'objective' viewpoint however, a person's 'actual' past will differ more or less from the subject's experience of it, all depending on the person's original perceptivity of it, on memory and - probably in relatively very few cases - on emotional memory-blockages or 'repressions'.

Not even the most 'objective' observer can have or obtain access to the facts of another person's supposed 'actual' past, except at best as regards certain facts, relative very small fragments of the whole of what a person has lived through. Sometimes a brilliant therapist may discover some fragments of much importance to the understanding of a person's development and relative misdevelopment. All in all, though, it must on reflection be obvious that such understanding and interpretation is fraught with many uncertainties and is very frail.

At all times, the primacy of the subject must be recognised in any transformation-oriented psychology. The past can really only be approached meaningfully through the subjective viewpoint of the person. There is no longer any 'actual' past that can be changed, at best there is a subjective relationship to the past that can be transformed.

There can be much futility in dwelling on the past. One cannot change one's past, yet one can of course learn from it and forward one's attitude towards and feelings about events and people by aid of this. There is obviously a limit to what one can learn from the past in that the requirements of the present and the need for renewal and on-going development must take primacy of place in life. It does not escape me that many traditional therapists will be strongly opposed to this view, undercutting as it does one of the key beliefs of many psychoanalytically-influenced theories and other therapeutic methods. Testimony does show cases of recovery from deep-seated psychic problems connected to past disturbances and traumas in people's early lives. Yet by no means does digging up the past in detail always helps the subject concerned. Of itself it is not necessarily transformative in its effect, and can easily work against regaining self-esteem. Past-fixated psychological analysis soon tends rather to increase and harden the sense of injury once sustained, of bitterness at fate or other persons (which is a futility) and even to create in an unwitting process a self-sustaining myth of problems due to supposed or real paralysing 'trauma'.

The tendency for therapists to influence their patients by many unwitting means to recall materials in exact accordance with their therapeutic doctrines is becoming well-known. Even a patient's dreams will take on the forms and symbols the therapist seeks. The danger that such supposedly 'recalled memories' are generated by suggestion, imagination and creative fantasy is always very real.

Many forms of highly past-oriented therapy lay much accent on various techniques of 'regression' which more or less blindly try to dig up just anything, going as far back as birth and beyond to alleged previous lifetimes. Clearly, this is like chasing a will of the wisp across dangerous ground which cannot be tested in advance or its reality or relevance verified by any reasonable methods.

The aim of self-transformation and that of all self-analysis is to free individuals of the burden of past experiences where these are negative. To 'forget the past' can be taken essentially to mean one should remember that what went before is of no further consequence in living on. Traumatic events, if one does ever actually manage to forget them, are not what anyone would to want to go on remembering, analysing or concentrating on because this is to prolong the negative experience and also to risk generating an unduly negative self-image and possibly even self-fulfilling prophesies of future negative experiences.

It is of course sometimes necessary to 'put the past behind one' and forgive and forget what cannot be changed. This can probably only be done fully by persons who have attained a fair degree of integration and mental detachment, having already become free of emotional or other entanglements due to previous events.

Testimony showing many cases of recovery from deep-seated psychic problems connected to past disturbances and traumas in people's early lives is to be duly recognised. There are, however, many different influences at work in any therapeutic situation so that many other conditions during therapy can have been conducive to alleviating the ill effects of past experiences.

The Future and Prognosis As discussed earlier, Vedanta rejects fatalism and adopts the assumption of voluntarism (i.e. free will under the limitations of the laws of action - karma - in the shape of both fate and destiny). In psychology a prognosis cannot ever have the validity of a genuine scientific prediction and should not be made as one makes a forecast, for this is like casting a mental spell (on whoever lets it impress them) in ignorance of the unknown and unknowable possibilities that always must be assumed to exist for personal development, whatever the outward circumstances etc.

A therapeutic prognosis is, at best, a well-informed suggestion or design for future behaviour and various options. The attitude informing self-transformation and any sensible type of therapy is well expressed by Maimonides as follows:- "We ought to exert our efforts in all (things) as though they were absolutely free, and God will do as he sees fit". (If one prefers to to believe in the existence of God, of course, one can substitute other agency or cause).

The uncertain future is a source of worry for many persons. Anxiety can consume the individual's sense of the present in the form of pessimistic fixations on imaginary futures. The lack of common sense, for determination and perserverence in facing present obstacles squarely are obvious in many forms of psychic disorder. Confused thinking about the nature of human existence and the cosmos can itself divert energy into depression by obscuring the nature of challenges as problems, of opportunities for self-growth as difficulties, which may of course be based on previous negative experiences of all kinds. In that case, the generation of self-confidence and ways of gaining self-esteem are required. It is well-known, of course, that more deep-seated anxiety comes from inability to face or cope with the human predicament itself.

The extremes of desperation, such as may give rise to thoughts of suicide, always contain negative assumptions and expectations about the future, however well-founded they may seem to be in experience. The suicidal mind is confusedly unaware of its own inherent desire for immortality, the urge for life to continue. The urge to survive may have atavistic and biological roots but, from the viewpoint of higher psychology, it reflects the higher urge; which is the fullness of conscious joy in being that yet remains unfulfilled. The problem is that we tend to seek the fulfilment of this urge mainly (or only) in the world, such as in terms of events projected into the individual future. Sucide is invariably and paradoxically a result of over-identification with body and ego and, to the same extent, to lack sufficient self-confidence.

Vedanta teaches that self-confidence means confidence in one's own inner divinity and its sustaining power. Self-confidence from worldly achievements does not give this true sense of basic trust and the underlying experience of peace of mind, because worldly conditions are ever subject to change. Whatever the causes of a lack of self-esteem - and its correlated lack of faith - the key to its solution lies only and always in the present. Yesterday cannot be brought back or changed, tomorrow never comes!

At various levels, we 'project' ahead of us our own future-shaping thoughts, words and acts. It is good to have a plan for one's further development, but not a rigid one. The future is rather like a dream... it may occur somehow as one imagines, but most likely it will not, at best, conform fully to one's plans. The future is what we project onto reality as we expect, want or perhaps fear it will be, and projection is a mental process of imagining potential situations. Our present person, our persona or our social role, is often seen as altering in the future... complementary to the present in fulfilling what one lacks, developing what one yet cannot do or a role or an identity one so far cannot realise.

To the extent that we are suspicious of life, life will, all in all, prove mistrustful. Persons who are chronically lacking in faith in others, whatever the cause of this condition or whatever realistic reasons they may have, also correspondingly lack genuine self-trust. Their doubts will work back on them in a wide range of possible ways and - sooner or later, to the lesser or the greater - they will fulfil their own prophecies or tend to induce and attract the very experiences they anticipated.