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Rites of Passage
Rites of passage are very much a part of our lives and thinking. For any who are familiar with the popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (WOW), we see benchmarks in our lives. We “level up”. Graduate from school, get promotions, get married, get divorced. There are rites of passage all through life, and…
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Go to the Edge
First seclusion, then the next stage of a rite of passage is limination. Going to the edge. These days many people make a career of that but there is no reason. It is sort of rebellion but without a clue. They go to the edge because they don’t like the center. Naturally it’s crazy, but…
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Ultimate Hubris
How many of you are in a tradition of some sort? I eat breakfast every day. Yes the cult of breakfast, I sometimes venerate the flying spaghetti monster in that rite as my own personal heresy. I just left my marriage, am between homes and starting a new job. I don’t do tradition. Ok, now have…
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Rule Tradition
If you’re proud of defying tradition, fine. Then if you don’t measure up, hell, you can defy your own tradition and go again. Don’t let the tradition rule you, you rule it. The old rites of passage were for dealing with what scared us, because honestly we are living things and whether we like it…
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Oldest Mystery
A female tradition that changes our values and priorities in amazing ways is menopause? Well, it can be. It used to be connected to one of humanities oldest mysteries. In many traditions the crone was the most powerful goddess, and crone does not equal ugly. Some people mistake that, but in fact the original meaning…
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Native American Beliefs
Native American religion isn’t actually a unified religion. In a sense, there both were and were not multiple faiths in the United States before the arrival of European culture. Many facets of it have been observed to parallel the now defunct Chinese religion of Bon, similar to Japanese Shintoism. It is basically Asian Shamanism. This…
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Animal Spirit Elders
The Native American culture has differing origin/creation stories. They all generally believed in a great spirit and the animal spirits were considered elders. Humans were seen as young in the world, but to their view animals were spirits, not necessarily confined to looking as they seem to obviously, and the line between human and animal wasn’t…
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Harmony of Thought
Can you go into the origins of the tobacco and spirit offering in Native American culture? Tobacco was considered a powerful spirit. It was considered to have the power to enliven the one smoking it, and even modern research has shown that nicotine after it’s metabolized has an anti-psychotic effect. And cannabis? The Native Americans…
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Christianity and Other Faith
Christianity has been around 2009 years give or take 30. Has it advanced us spiritually? In a sense, yes. The dissonance caused has, and even the message at the heart of the doctrine which had a hand in inspiring Islam. Though the big three (Muslim, Christianity, Judaism) despaired their fourth brother, the Yezidi faith (non…
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Mystical Approach to Christianity
The Christ Consciousness movement is a technically heretical view of Christian dogma. It’s sort of neo-Gnosticism. It focuses on the Christ and the Holy Spirit rather than the person of Jesus the Christ as a phenomenon, and had a Greek emphasis. The word literally means christening or christened one. In a sense, it’s like the…
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Jesus Christ
Christ was a living person? Well, this is where people get confused. Christ isn’t a name, and even old Gnostics saw the messiah as a spirit. Swedenborgian Christianity believes that the prophecy is already fulfilled, but Christ was socially a title. Even King Herod who was King of the Jews bore the title Christ. Though…
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An Angry Jesus
Christ’s noble truths he widdled down to one, and the Christ Consciousness movement emphasizes this. God is love and though art God. The term love didn’t have such a narrow view, it meant for all intents and purposes peace. That in finding peace you find God, not in finding rationalization and he speaks heavily against…
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What is Scientology?
Scientology came about as much good science fiction does. L. Ron Hubbard is the founder, and he did extensive research into world cultures, beliefs, religious experience in general, and he noticed as many do, that there is a common thread in all these efforts, all these creeds and bodies of practice. I have read his…
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Second Hand Insight
Scientologists are selling the second hand insight, and require their parishioners to sign many legally binding forms before they can receive services. Their insights aren’t bogus, and in fact I encourage people myself to rephrase any insight they understand from another source. If it’s yours, it’s yours. Even in Christianity the Bible says that the…
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No Crazier
In respect to the Evangelicals that build fortified shelters and food storage, in the barren bad land in the western United States, the Scientologists also believe in an environmental doomsday. This is the same global event that the Mayans predicted would occur in 2012. Unlike the Evangelicals, the Scientologist doomsday plan is to use the…
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Cults
The hermit can be considered strongly individualistic. They tend to develop serious aberrations as well, unless they went into hermitage with a discipline, with a focus, a reason why. Do Americans have this purpose for isolation? The wife beater likes to keep his activities very quiet, the child molester too, the hypocritical clergyman. But as…
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Bushido Philosophy
Bushido is a diverse body of philosophy, and it is strongly linked to the Japanese religion of Shintoism. Shintoism and Ma’at (the native religion of Egypt) are very similar. They are tied to the forces of nature and the land. Holding them sacred, but also having a sense of divine order and humans connection to…
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Killing Outside Boundaries
In Bushido, murder meant killing outside of the boundaries of the order, a dishonourable killing. The acts of the Ninja were considered murder. To kill another in battle is ok? Yes, except for the weak or the unprepared. Thus why Ninjas were seen as so dishonourable. They held to a different creed. A sect of…
Category: World Belief
On my spiritual path I have studied many world beliefs. While I don’t claim to be an authority on them, I will share some of what I’ve learned in the ‘World Beliefs’ category. Perhaps they will inspire you to seek further.
Those who abandon their faith are not faithless. Perhaps quite to the contrary, their faith has given them the strength to abandon trappings. Religion from the Latin religio meaning practice. We will all have practices. I was very devout myself, and in my devotion I found I could no longer devote myself to that creed. My faith isn’t weak. It motivates my seeking. I don’t subscribe to any specific faith. I find truth in my personal experience which does loosely label me a Gnostic. Many Gnostic schools say the logos indwells our sun itself.
The Buddhas wisdom was put into the context of the greater way as was the only way it could be, but in fact the symbolism is at best intuitively true. The spheres exist within us. Wisdom is simple. It is the sign of true knowing. Not if they can spout arcane jargon, but can they take an arcane topic and make it abundantly clear to the uninitiated.
I will state that these beliefs discussed are not necessarily my beliefs.
“There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religious.” Friedrich Nietzsche