Spirituality for Living

I find that just as in physics, resistance plays a big part in spirituality as well. What we resist isn’t removed by our resistance, and much of orthodox religious teaching seems to extol resistance, denial, asceticism. I suppose they can create a supportive context for spiritual growth, but these days in most cultures there really [...]

Conditioning is a terrible thing to overcome, and in identifying it we resist it. It was all we were taught to do… not identifying the source, that primal world that we still come from. We didn’t arise by accident. No body does. Accidents are human, but even that is not defining. Accidents are human, but [...]

If you do a thing and you do it right the first time, what must you learn? Really nothing. That is not defining of the human condition, but we make it a part of it. Mostly because as I have said before, we are taught to resist our problems. When all you have is a [...]

The language gets sketchy. Is mind thinking? Isn’t thinking just an action? Awareness goes beyond thinking. The mind as we know it comes after, not before. It’s automatic and it is why people get so tripped up. They are told to control your mind. Free yourself from your mind. Like somehow you can lobotomize yourself [...]

I have been accused of being amoral because I can view action in that way, mine and others. But if you judge, can you also be compassionate? Mercy matters, but can you show mercy if your actions or those of others are somehow about your person?
Cause and effect. Energy is a dance. We consider some [...]

Gnosis has many sources. It is one of those phenomenon like the preponderance of certain symbols that co-arose cross culturally. Like the presence of dragons in every world mythology.
The intuition that “god” is somehow indwelling the human soul has been expressed in many ways across all world cultures. The “gods” can be real even if [...]

People doubt the overblown concepts, sensationalized belief systems, and I don’t think that’s bad. Spirituality should be just as subject to testing and evaluation as science and technology are. If there isn’t any readily available wisdom that you can apply then why believe it?
How do you test spirituality? Do the doctrines or insights of the [...]

We have to cooperate with others, but you aren’t cooperating if some principle mandates it. You co-operate when you are still being you, and working with the other who is who they are. Some say we have to compromise but it depends on your definition of compromise. You can compromise your contribution out of existence.
I [...]

There were two broad schools of thought in Chinese belief; naturalistic and legalistic. The Taoists were an example of the naturalistic school using nature and allegorical stories to focus on observations of the way the world works in general. Confucianism was more humanistic. Confucius focused on ethics and human concerns with the basic premise that [...]

Alchemy uses a series of beliefs that I myself practice. Both intuitive and literal observations of matter and the natural world, but it is more focused on artifice. It even had a doctrine that doesn’t really defy common sense; That nature doesn’t create finished products. This is why alchemy had an almost moral agenda to [...]

The spiritual insights of the Norse religion can be summarized as a collection of intuitive metaphors called “kennings”, and we still use the word. They governed community meetings, called “things”. This is how their communities were governed, and skalds kept the remembrance of the kennings as well as the decisions and events that occurred in [...]

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 [...]

The shadow consciousness theory of psychology is the notion of suppression of our selves by our judgement. When we see other people doing what we have stopped ourselves from doing, it traumatizes the shadow consciousness. Our judgement traumatizes it reflexively. Being moral entrepreneurs it brings doubts to our certainties or enforces our bitterness and jealousy [...]

There can be said to be two paths in the world. In the Cabala they are called the pillar of mercy, and the pillar of severity, but in fact there are three points.  They are only opposed in the minds of those who oppose them. My own path is more in keeping with the pillar of [...]

They say adversity doesn’t make you who you are, it shows who you are. It’s there. There is more than judgement. Like language is acquired by an infant, there is a language behind the mind/body connection. There is a language by which the world is assembled, and having failed to acquire that it makes things [...]

Judgement, what it is and what it does. Judgement is an inherently restrictive force in the mind, but it lays no restrictions on others not without some overt force. Our judgements restrict us. We do not perceive our world directly. We do not see things as they are. We see them as we judge them [...]

Here is an example of negative self judgement: A man feels that there must be something wrong with any woman who wants to be with him, and feeling this way has him sabotaging his relationships. In this case, he has learned to take relationships seriously, and likely has looked at his own behaviour in a very [...]

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 [...]

Satanism is more complex than people see it and it has had a long history. The Knights Templar were accused of it and many factions of Christianity were dismissed as Satanism including most if not all Gnostic Christianity. So there have been different nested groups that contribute their belief systems to modern Satanism. Even Catholicism [...]