Spirituality for Living

Mortification of the flesh to what purpose, disidentification? Yes indeed.  When people still undertook it with the proper intent, but it has no merit if it’s merely a self destructive act.
Are there not other ways less destructive to disidentify? Yes, and ’destructiveness’ is a key concept. It is not the key concept of self mortification. [...]

Judgement is something I have been dealing with lately, but there are some simple facts regarding it. As much as people may want to believe otherwise, we do not respond to an objective reality. The world and our lives as we see them are simply the bi-product of judgements me make. The first and foremost being [...]

Perhaps less philosophical is therapeutic touch. Therapeutic touch has been found to reduce the nervous defence response. This is the biggest part of its healing benefit. They have done extensive studies on a phenomenon called biophilia. We inherently are comforted by life. Even loud noisy life, wild life, and more than life in general we have the [...]

Inner nature is love. God is love, and we are God. We are in Gods image. Children of the whole unified spirit. It can be a choice, but it’s really a realization. The hatred was never a choice. What moved you to hatred was an idea of an absence of love, or a powerlessness of [...]

Many of our modern ghost stories once served to illustrate things they believed about life. If you got ill, it was because an ancestor was upset or because they withdrew from your disrespect and an evil non human spirit was permitted to enter you. The idea of the body as an object, but also as [...]

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, [...]

Beware. Anger seems to be an inflammatory topic. We all deal with anger frequently if not daily, and we have a lot of ways of dealing with it. We are actually told more about anger than we are about love. Yet of what use is it? If the common wisdom and understanding of angry is [...]

Who is actually fascinated with their own minds? Because your mind is your world, and you are response able people. If you would have a hand in change then realize that what you have, and what you feel, is where you are at, and by that same power that you change your feelings and change your [...]

The “no you” idea always sets me off a bit. We are so programmed to be self negating that it seems to be reverse arrogance, false humility. It’s like saying we can’t be involved, or it’s beneath us because there is no us. We are still here. I see you.
Who is still here? The buddha, [...]

Aren’t people basically just selfish, and talking about all this stuff a bit of a waste of time? Hmm, my son has a strange habit. When I take him out to eat he will order something he wants, then he will want to feed me parts of it. I sort of don’t want whatever he’s offering, [...]

I find it funny how dual peoples minds are. They think love is opposed to hate, that being friendly is different from being aggressive. It differs in quality from love certainly, but in my experience it’s not that simple. We move in the world, in the situations we find ourselves in, in relationship to other [...]

Hate is learned.
We ascribe evil qualities to fire, because it seems to lay things to waste. We do not permit it place. In the natural dynamic tension there is no hate. Fire does not hate, and its energy though it destroys gives new life as well. So in dramatizing this conflict, in mistakenly believing this [...]

Hate destroys by depletion. It shows itself in war with hate as the idea of conquest, and taking by force. But in fighting and destroying you lose what you supposedly would desire to possess. Hate comes from the same energy as love. It’s your very life force, our soul if you will, but it is [...]

I am often surprised at how dualistic peoples minds are; love this, hate that, this is good, that is bad, this is spiritual, that is dirty. There are creeds today that though they profess to espouse unity, encourage us to deny/ignore/reject parts of our being.
A lot gets lumped in under ego, but ego is a [...]

When Jesus went into his meditative retreat, it came to mind that he could claim power. He was being heralded as the next King of Israel, as well as the messiah, and he confronted these. He didn’t just ward himself against the devil, nor was his purity evident in being untouched by darkness, but quite [...]

The idea of ‘that is me’… I have an idea of who I am, and honestly it’s not a very interesting idea. It isn’t very fun, so since I like interesting ideas and fun, I look around. Where am I now really? Do I know everything about what is here? What can I do here?
In [...]

Are you familiar with the term synchronicity? We protect our inner demons, because they have meaning for us. This is why we created them, and they do indeed manifest both as a social shift due to scapegoating, and as weird synchronicities if they are heavily charged enough.  There are meaningful events linked to the meaning of the [...]

I am talking about a respect that stems only from awareness, and empowers choice rather than making you feel you must do only one thing.
Awareness means knowing? Yes. A knowing from being and respecting being of others. Being is not out of order, but we are taught to think, and we are taught thoughts of [...]

Abstinence can be freeing in a way. It leads to greater indulgence, and allows for informed choice. Abstinence lets you really feel and understand your own being, and how you are letting it reflect in the world anyway, but it needn’t be compulsory. Rather than “never do this” and “always do that”, maybe it can [...]

Who here is wiser than the whole planet?
People who train their body not to do something like cry really get twisted. If I try hard not to cry, I usually do it anyway. Maybe that is why some folks can’t take all that excitement. They would be uncomfortably afraid.
Unfortunately we train our body to repress [...]