Spirituality for Living Tag: religion

What is Belief?

If you’re new here, seek and you will find…and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!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 [...]

Prophecy

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 [...]

Relationship with Religion

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 and Spirituality

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 [...]

Image of God

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 [...]

What is Taoism?

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, [...]

Taoist Practice

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 [...]

Practice and the Personal Path

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 [...]

God is Right Here

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 [...]

Gods and Divine Potential

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, [...]

Form of Faith

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 Soul and Hell

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 [...]

Mana and Justice

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 [...]

Co-Creation with Spirits

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 [...]

Confucianism Q&A

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 [...]