Month: June 2009

  • Being With Change

    Being With Change

    Just learning to be ok with change can challenge some of us. This is true, it can be a challenge. But there is an old Arabic curse, “May your every wish be immediately fulfilled.” In all of your struggling to resist change, what if you said nothing can change? You just don’t like change, so…

  • Foundation of Awareness

    Foundation of Awareness

    Personality types reveal more than they would seem to. What makes our personality real? Is it really nothing more than conditioning and arbitrarily selected views? We don’t have uniform instincts across the human spectrum do we? I mean, when people are pushed past reason do they all act the same way? When you are pushed…

  • Personality Domains

    Personality Domains

    How many domains of function are there? There have been both mystical and newer “scientific” systems to identify personality traits. There are many four quadrant models, and even math can in a sense apply to this. Psychology identifies only two broad personality types in both genders, so in a sense again a total of four.…

  • Your Strengths

    Your Strengths

    You can claim nothing, say you embody all personality types and have nothing to use or build on, or you can get down to application. We can be nice and religious about this, but are my strengths your strengths? There are things that are me, and there are things that are you. For me visual imagery,…

  • Defeat of Ego

    Defeat of Ego

    Is the frustration invalid because it’s “bad“? Some people avoid any and all frustration like they aren’t allowed to be frustrated for some reason. I can get very frustrated, but I have no reason to resent anyone. I can’t blame them for options I don’t have because I do have them, and I take them.…

  • Spiritual Family

    Spiritual Family

    I do like the idea of accepting the literal facts of gender difference without additional prejudice. Men don’t need to be emasculated, women don’t need to be intimidated, yet we do both. In the States, if a man gets married he’s seen as having “gotten a wife”. I often mock my male friends for how…

  • Let Go

    Let Go

    I value my shadow side, and have a natural inclination toward it. It is sort of my spirituality, but people often mistake me. A light during the day can go unnoticed in the broader light. This same light in darkness stands out very clearly. If you are a darkly inclined person it doesn’t mean you…

  • Between State

    Between State

    Stuck in the physical…. You don’t know how good you have it. You can be stuck between, now that sucks. You can’t fully engage anything so it forces you to improvise. Stuck between alive and dead? That is a coma? Yes, and no. Coma is closer to dead, just on the threshold of free. I…

  • Time of Death

    Time of Death

    Is there really a force that tells you when you can die, or is it the person that makes that call? It’s a mix of things. Most people think of life and the “other side”, but that division doesn’t really exist. Essentially it’s like looking at the world through a one way mirror.  God can’t, and…

  • The Other Side

    The Other Side

    People think that what kills goes away when you die. It doesn’t. It stays, but when you die what kills is revealed and made manifest. This applies even to those who “go to heaven”. There is a rhythmic marker on people, and is why suicides fair so poorly. Rhythmic? Yes. A temporal signature. Linear time…

  • Stoic Morality

    Stoic Morality

    In Stoic philosophy the way of a reasonable life is foremost, and they value universal reason over human reason. They say that poor moral conduct is an error of ignorance, but they don’t define morality in a religious sense. They do have a sort of dualistic view of the world, but it isn’t materialistic. They…

  • Alive and Active

    Alive and Active

    Stoicism is a school of philosophy from ancient Greece, and it is not fully understood in modern thinking today.  In the age of the Greek philosophical schools, they weren’t just a belief system. They were a way of life, and philosophers were very serious people like our scientists today. Science even started with them, and it…

  • Stoic Fate

    Stoic Fate

    There is a missing element that modern Stoics don’t usually embrace. The Hegemon, or logos, is still alive and aware in the world. The world is itself possessed of intelligence in the original Stoic view.  They saw life as a constant dialogue, a “debate” if you will, with that intelligence. They did believe in adhering…