Logopraxis work is psychological work, you are called to work with the Word in a way that brings a light onto your mental life with its thoughts and affections. It’s a given that you have a life in the external world, but this external level of life with its relationships, activities, situations, and circumstances is not the direct focus of LP work. It’s important that these levels of life are kept separate in our thinking so that we can be clear about the “right” points for the application of the portion of text we are seeking to work with. When we first begin working with this approach we tend to focus on our outer life, looking for improvements in our circumstances, relationships etc. We have yet to see that disharmonies in outer life are but outer effects that represent disharmonious relationships that exist between elements within ourselves. In LP work the issue is never the person we choose to focus on in the external world, this is merely a diversionary tactic of the proprium to draw our attention away from where the real work has to be done.

It is perhaps one of the most difficult things of all not to have our attention drawn into the external world and see it with its outer events, circumstances, and people as having some causal connection with how we are feeling internally. If only this or that would change, if only she or he would just do things this way then… What we fail to see when attitudes like this dominate our sense of life is that it creates wrong ways of thinking in terms of the relationship between the outer and inner life that result in unnecessary suffering. Outer things are always effects, inner things are what are causal, the Writings say this, the spiritual world is a world of causes while the natural world is the world of effects. This is a spiritual law and as such cannot be reversed. Yet how often do we have it reversed in the way we relate our external to our internal life. If we are looking to see changes in our external world thinking that such changes will provide us with relief from inner feelings of discomfort, frustration, sadness, or alternatively provide us with feelings of happiness, fulfilment, and joy in life then we don’t understand the nature of the laws that govern cause and effect. We will forever be looking to see changes in our externals missing, or even refusing, to give attention to our inner spiritual world which is where the cause of suffering truly lies. This attitude lives from a belief that the external world is causal and the internal world is its effect which is an inversion of an established law of life. Whenever our beliefs run contrary to what is true the inevitable result will be some form of suffering.

Logopraxis provides us with the tools to see how disharmonies in outer life can be useful for our spiritual growth if we make a conscious effort to use them as a trigger to remind us to focus our attention on our inner states of mental life. If we would do this while resisting the temptation to attribute causal properties to outer events then maybe some change might become possible in the nature of the states we choose to bring to outer events and which ultimately determine the quality of meaning we bring to them.

May the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in Your sight O Lord.