When you were just an infant, your experience was, in the words of William James, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” You had no language and hence no discrete categories of thought to label, classify, and organize your perceptions. Everything just swirled around you, bombarding your senses from every side. It was fascinating – and frequently overwhelming.Continue reading “Seeing the Truth”
Tag Archives: belonging
5 Floors
Ego is just your “I,” the center of self-conscious experience that locates and manages a personal identity in the middle of everything. It’s not what is wrong with you, or the “obstacle” on your path to liberation, enlightenment, and wellbeing. In fact, none of those long-sought goals of salvation would be possible without your ego.Continue reading “5 Floors”
Crossroads
Part of me really wants to believe that human destiny holds something more in store for us than just more of the same. I mean, more than just strapping ourselves inside spaceships and taking our problems somewhere else. Human destiny will entail going beyond ourselves somehow, but populating some distant planet isn’t likely to bringContinue reading “Crossroads”
Save the Baby!
Just as we can think of the lifeforce, which remains a mystery to science, as something that animates the myriad living forms in existence, we might also regard the countless forms of religion throughout human history as so many expressions of another mystery, called spirituality or spiritual life. And just as when the lifeforce “goesContinue reading “Save the Baby!”
A World Worth Imagining
That little plant in the illustration to the left is rooted in a Mystery of deeper oneness named Being. It is also connected inside a Web of higher wholeness named Universe. If our plant knows any of this, it is not at some epistemic level of knowing, using logic and rational thought to construct aContinue reading “A World Worth Imagining”
Spiritual Fitness and Our Human Future
Just as we might go to a gym to work out, or into the hills for a hike, we have a basic understanding that improving our fitness requires immersing ourselves in environments where the activity is sufficiently strenuous but not too much to manage. Of course, if we never exercise, our muscles will lose toneContinue reading “Spiritual Fitness and Our Human Future”
Figuring It Out
More than any other time in human history, we are obsessed with personal identity. This isn’t to suggest that people in earlier times were ignorant or indifferent to it. Research into human psychological development strongly suggests that identity formation is universal. We all go through it. Quite a few of us, however, don’t get throughContinue reading “Figuring It Out”
Intentionally Human
In Next Steps I presented the “map” to a more authentic and fulfilling human experience, according to the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality (Sophia Perennis) which has been active now for several thousand years across numerous cultures and religions. The spirituality and its map are the shared product and collective property of homo sapiens, andContinue reading “Intentionally Human”
Drift, Sink, or Sail?
Your life is like a sailboat. The “boat” of your life needs to be buoyant and watertight, with sufficient integrity to withstand the force of waves against it. And the “sail” needs to be tall enough to catch the wind, as well as broad enough to harness its force. A sailboat with no sail canContinue reading “Drift, Sink, or Sail?”
Seduction of the Mindless Life
The exact age at which we begin making intentional choices in life is up for debate, but there are good reasons for putting it somewhere between three and five. This is about the time when language acquisition has provided us with a lens for organizing the world around us, and with a mirror for reflectingContinue reading “Seduction of the Mindless Life”
Tracts of Revolution 