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 [...]

There is an interesting phenomenon happening soon that has never really happened before. Many prophetic cycles have resolved recently or will be resolving soon, like the Mayan calendar and the 2012 date. Myself I don’t canonize any cycle, but I think intuitively we can observe that many things are coming clear at this point and [...]

Can people have a healthy relationship with religion? Yes, they can. The word religion comes from the latin word “religio” meaning a body of practices. Religion is like meditation. It’s the social aspect of factionalism. It is false identification, to use a Buddhist concept, that is toxic. The interfaith movements are a powerful force for [...]

Madness as it relates to spirituality. It is strange. They say the more you learn the less you know. The deeper the knowing goes the less you can say anything for certain and then when you are questioned people just dismiss your responses as being obtuse. You become an expert at learning.
Buddhism is often accused [...]

Why is science now a religion? And why is psychology the “rational” definition of soul? In many peoples minds, if I say “I believe I am the image of god”, people will call me crazy. But if I accept the psychological terms and describe myself that way, then that is ok. The erroneous notion of [...]

Taoism is one of those world religions that sort of isn’t one. Many popular Chinese concepts are connected to Taoism and actually in many ways it’s like the Egyptian faith. The basic principle is acceptance of and living with the natural way. Lao-Tzu was its unofficial founder and one of the immortals that are venerated, [...]

There are many allegories in Taoism and much like Greek Gnosticism it is heavily experience based, though there are a body of philosophers referred to as sages who are viewed as having deep insight into the Tao, like Chuang-Tzu and other students of Lao Tzu.
Does Taoism have monks and nuns like Buddhism? No, and in [...]

So what do the psychic realms of function mean personally? We all come to a metaphysical or spiritual practice with our essence as it always was, even if we don’t understand our own nature well and often times we engage the first path we come across. Like the very “spiritual” and popular mysticism, and if [...]

To thine own self be true is not advice to be a libertine. There is only one Tao, but the tao is infinite in its manifestations.
Am I religious? I don’t look for god. God is right here. I am knowingly religious, in that I do use techniques to explore myself and my relationship to the [...]

What is the ‘god’ structure in Hinduism? That differs, but there are some principles across the board. One is the concept of a universal spirit called by many names actually, but not in a divisive way. More as a recognition of the manifold nature of this universal spirit. It is called by the brahminists Brahman, [...]

What’s my religion, if I have one? Officially I don’t, or perhaps in the strictest sense of the word religion I do. I adopt a Gnostic view and see the spirit and the universe as one, however you choose to characterize these principles. I see neither a reason to anthropomorphize divinity, nor to view it [...]

Egyptian religion was both intuitive and rationalistic.  Since its focus was so pragmatic the Greeks and Romans actually saw no reason to compromise it, and translated some of their concepts into Greek or Roman terms. Thus the cult of Osiris gave birth to the elusian mysteries, and other imagery became very wide spread. There was [...]

I tend to use the kahuna concept of mana to evaluate any path. Mana is a concept of “proven effectiveness”. It plugs into the idea that whoever or whatever was more in synch with the over arching order would be stronger and more able than those who worked against it or were just resistant to [...]

There is co creating with specific non-incarnated entities. It is common, and it is the foundation of concepts that motivate things like Japanese filial piety. They work with us all the time. They tend to work more than we do.
The Japanese observe death related religious practices, because they believe they still affect our lives. They weren’t [...]

What were some of the fundamentals about his thoughts or ideas? The analects of Confucius are a collection of works of his basic socio-political doctrines, and his teaching on social justice and compassion. He spoke of the need for loyalty and centralized authority, but not blind obedience. This is why his teachings would later result [...]

Norse religion still affects much of our culture today. Our fondness for feast holidays originates with them, as does the name of many of our days of the week. Their imagery has much in common with Indo-European religion, and is a variant of shamanism in many ways it’s practiced. It was primarily a clan based [...]

The Norse saw there as not being one world, but nine. Perhaps corresponding to the chakras of eastern mysticism, and these nine worlds rested on ygrdassil the world tree not unlike the Jewish tree of life. Modern physics also have a theory of ten dimensions, but seen from our point of view it might seem like [...]

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 [...]

Scientism: The precept that science is the foundation of all knowledge and that all truth can be arrived at by empirical method. Does this seem presumptuous, even crazy? The scientific method is a relatively new fangled thing. To think it can have all the answers seems crazy? Well lets embrace a more critical mindset as [...]

Is the sole purposes of most religions to explain the universe and crowd control? Hmm, yes, except for explaining the universe. Religion sets up a paradigm that supports the temporal authority of that institution whatever body politic.
Religion as a primitive physics? Physics isn’t primitive? Why to date is cold fusion supposedly untenable? Why do we implement [...]