Spirituality for Living

The subject is passion including the much reviled “passions”. They usually speak of them in right hand and left hand paths. One school of thought is that they are only stumbling blocks preventing peace. The teachings of the right hand path are very popular, and you can get material written on it at any book store [...]

We do have a duty and the motive is love. Interestingly, love is not a passion, it transcends those dynamics. It is a principle that cannot be confined to the inner vortex of passions.
‘Duty‘. If you understand the word, ‘dharma’ is closer. It is a way, not a single force, but the encompassing rule of [...]

Thinking gets you where you are and often gets you stuck and keeps you there. Do your passions arise from thinking?
Can you be angry and out of control and be aware that you are angry and out of control? If you are truly aware, then are you out of control? We are alive first, thinking [...]

With any facet of life, in the light of awareness there is a mirror image. For every truth, an equal and opposite truth. We often revile the negative as destructive. We say that is the opposite of what we want, when in fact it’s a mirror image of the thing desired. This is why attachment [...]

Psychic function is not any more mysterious or complicated than learning style. One of the biggest stumbling blocks about learning to perform psychically is the idea that it’s necessarily a special state of mind. The brain itself is a sense organ. It exists to sense the input from the senses and assemble it into “coherent” [...]

The difference between coming to rest in life, and stagnation. Very different dynamics. We often feel that anything in life must be our decision. That we have to be in control. So we often set rhythms in our life that actually raise our general stress level. We think we either have to be driven, or [...]

The search for rest is what takes so many people into substance abuse. To take a break from their inner chaos. The process that leads to addiction is not “evil” in the person. We do even the harmful things because we perceive a need, but are not always in touch with our real needs. So [...]

My own spiritual path is based not on abstaining from passion, but on embracing it. When you truly embrace it and let it consume you, you learn something surprising. This you it consumed is not “you”. Not the all encompassing thing. Some have described me as having strong self control. I don’t actually. I don’t [...]

Why can’t people accept that they can’t control their life or others? They misidentify themselves so they don‘t know who they are. They think there is a ‘them’ that needs to struggle. For example, accepting a suicide is hard, and there is no such thing as merely accepting. Life exists in a pattern of tensions [...]

The ‘Working with Chakras’ series of posts is an interview of a conversation on the chakras. What they are, and how you can work with them. We hope you find it of value in furthering your understanding of energy and personal growth. Working with Chakras: Part I starts with an overview, Part II begins to [...]

So to speak more on mortification of the flesh practices, they often show that there is more to us than our desires. Practices served as rights of passage, much like tribal ritual scarification. It still is practiced in the Opus Dei. They are flagellates if I recall. Opus dei, work of god in Latin. Some [...]

There are basically two ritual paths, and you will find one or the other in any faith. An exoteric path and an esoteric. An ecstatic path or a contemplative, same thing. Though one is seen as holy and is approved, and the other tends to get demonized. There is even a story from the Bible [...]

Suppression for the common good. Abstinence makes the heart grow colder. Makes it grow downright dead. I often speak of how I feel alone, and people usually just dismiss it as more drama, as my anxiety. No, it’s just my experience. I can see this pattern of communication and reaction.  The initial action even comes [...]

The biggest complaint everyone has is the lack of energy. I hear it constantly. We as a culture are told to control ourselves. To subdue our feelings and motivations, and then wonder why we have no motivation. Energy doesn’t come from what we are supposed to do, that saps energy. We have to re-route energy [...]

One of the appeals of fantasy role playing even in the way it started which was Dungeons & Dragons, was that the characters from mythology (the heroes) are ultimately us and represent all the types. Those types still exist, just not in the same context. The roles they chose to make classes in the original [...]

Control is a human obsession. It’s a human endeavour, and it’s human nature. Control is very poorly understood at best. Control is how we kill ourselves. Control is what we do when we kill pain. Control is what we do when we kill time. Control is what we do when we medicate the mentally unfit. [...]

There is a lot of popularity to the concept of manifestation, but it is poorly understood. It is like telling people to think of pink bunnies though nothing motivates them to think of pink bunnies. Expressed in the way they do, it has little power because it sees only part of the nature of what [...]

People argue the relativity of truth, or the nature of absolute truth. The paradox is that all truth is relative so none of it is. It behaves like truth and this relative truth is very here and now. It is in this reality so the ‘nothing matters’ crowd is wrong, and the ‘everything needs to [...]

If you are fascinated with the astral plane, this is where you lose control because you set it apart. You see it as special, and disempowered yourself from dealing with it. When you set it apart you blind yourself, and many people do. They don’t want to engage. They want a fantasy story. They want [...]

Control is human obsession and human nature. The idea of control that most people embrace is also a delusion. We control to keep things static. We control in denial of what is available to us. We abstain from embracing the now because it would deny us control. In denying the reality of our perception, we deny [...]