Spirituality for Living

It’s my experience that even away from organized religion, people still have very strong feelings about ‘belief’. I think I will start with what belief ultimately is.
It’s a feeling of certainty and it does not require logical support. It does require experiential support and it is necessary to human function. It is a part of [...]

Lately, I have been dealing with the affects of doubt in my life. So the topic today is the impact on doubt in the process of meditation. Now doubt is a very common process. We are brought up to engage in the style of thinking that encourages doubt and honestly doubt isn’t completely worthless. But [...]

It is safe to say that both mortification of the flesh and the stock market crash are manifestations of something. We learn by testing. We learn by trial, and in the past there have been trials of all kinds. Now we are putting our trade on trial. People want to feel safe and will create risk [...]

Hope in this day and age seems a much maligned feeling. Yet we deal with levels of mental illness that have never been known before. Stress related illnesses are our biggest killers, and yet we are admonished to be realistic, be rational.  How realistic is it to say that we should be rational first and [...]

Some people faint when overloaded with new things. The resulting stress they don’t assimilate well. Their meaning is being lost, and they often screen the reality of the new experience out all together. Blue screen of death, does not compute!
Now imagine a person who triggers that in people even in their formative years. Routinely seeing [...]

Someone who is quite depressed is so because of how he is ‘thinking’ about the situation. He is in that. He is causing his distress and it is not the situation itself. What could be said further is to ask him how he feels when he isn’t thinking about what has him depressed. Unless his [...]

If we must attribute power to events and the mechanics of life, then this suggests it is then a rule, does it not? If it’s not a rule then maybe the mechanics as we see them aren’t seen clearly? If events have power, they arise from cause and effect. Look over any community and there [...]

We were all at one point happy. Literally all of us have been happy at least at one point in our lives. The reason being is that happiness is a natural state of being. It isn’t an emotion. It’s not a mood that comes and goes. Moodiness comes to replace happiness when we are taught [...]

Anger is something that people delude themselves about seriously, and it never goes away. At any time you could become angry, and as much as you meditate, as much as you pray, anger doesn’t go away does it?
It just needs the trigger and there in lays the problem, the trigger. People villainize the emotion, [...]

Is acting out of character depression? Depression precedes acting out of character. It’s the natural decay of the minds faculties from a mass of inhibitory tensions. It is living a life of “thou shalt not” without actually understanding why, or managing that “inner demon” so that it doesn’t smash it’s prison, your mind. It’s a [...]

The definition of astral energy is any spiritual/psychic energy. Life force. It is the raw life force. It’s the “observer force” from physics. It’s why they say in the Bible, if there were no human beings the rocks would praise God.
Is it like when people have out of body experiences? Yes, it’s like that if [...]

Doubt is so subtle, and yet so very fully destructive. The subtlety makes it sneaky, and it doesn’t stay to one thing. It sits on your shoulder squawking, and the more it squawks the worse it builds. It can fowl even pleasant things. Then we can over react to the situation, but I actually think that [...]

I am considered autistic. It makes me a natural nihilist, and I have always been a negative thinker. The funny thing is, I tried with all my might not to be. This drove me into a deep depression, and the more I tried to understand the world as I was told it was, and the [...]

Responsibility. Are we responsible for anything beyond our direct human connections?

I don’t see how we can be.
Well, doesn’t that include the cosmos? We do chant for the sun to rise.

Our direct connections do include the land we live with, yes, but most people feel ill equipped to see the land as something you can communicate [...]

There is not one way and we should all be on it. There are many ways, like many blood vessels in the body. Thank God/nature/providence for that, no?
The best results are the ones I couldn’t have thought up or expected. But you can be in touch with what takes you there. We all can with [...]

I know someone who agreed to live in a place that is killing her to get a job. Her health has declined horribly. Is she frustrated, and if so how would it be about the environment?
In order for her to earn a living, she has to be subjected to harm? This is her belief, yes.
She [...]

Can a physical storm hit and not create a sensory/cognitive impression?
The electrical impulses zapping around our brain is like a storm. So where is the boundary between the physical storm and the cerebral ones?
Perhaps that’s why a storm feels like a mini renewal? A lot of people report a storm “clears their head”.
How do we [...]

Let’s look at these serious situations. Seriousness, hmm. What use is that idea? I do these talks because I am completely willing to be foolish.
Is nature serious? Is a hunting wolf serious? I suspect not. I suspect it is just hungry. What would happen if it were serious about hunting?
He would need a strategy and [...]