Letting Go, Coming Together

In Spiritual Direction I offered a way of understanding human development following the evolutionary map of consciousness across its generative, individuative, and unitive principles. I suggested that these three principles are what inform the narrative structure of Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” throughout the world’s mythologies, using the New Testament Hero Myth of Jesus in Luke-Acts asContinue reading “Letting Go, Coming Together”

The Music of Your Life

Back in the late sixth century BCE, the Greek polymath Pythagoras taught that the great crystalline spheres carrying our moon, the planets, and distant stars constituted a celestial musical harmony. His was perhaps the first conception of the cosmos to envision all things as comprising a “universe,” in the sense of a single coordinated systemContinue reading “The Music of Your Life”

Beyond Happiness

The fact that happiness is such a dominant theme in modern life reveals two significant things about us: (1) that the progression threshold of human evolution at this point in time is firmly stationed on the pivotal questions of personal identity, meaning, and purpose; and (2) the probability that we are stuck in this stageContinue reading “Beyond Happiness”

Breakpoint for Humanity

The concept of community is widely misunderstood and frequently gets misapplied to types of human groupings such as assemblies, crowds, neighborhoods, or regional populations. These others are based on a quantitative function of individuals gathered or grouped together, and might be distinguished by their specific conditions of location, setting, or occasion. Community, on the otherContinue reading “Breakpoint for Humanity”

Arriving at Last in the Kindom of Spirit

Depending on whether you query conventional religion about the way of salvation, or ask your question of the Sophia Perennis (the transcultural tradition of spiritual wisdom), you’re likely to get very different answers. Religion will speak in dogmatic terms of what you need to believe and what you need to do in order to qualifyContinue reading “Arriving at Last in the Kindom of Spirit”

Ecospirituality and a New Humanity

For anything to emerge into existence and evolve over time, it needs to differentiate from the preconditions of its “womb” environment as well as from others around it. The magnificent proliferation and diversity of life on Earth has advanced not only by forming new connections and relationships, but also by this process of “differencing” orContinue reading “Ecospirituality and a New Humanity”

Empathy and Human Salvation

It’s easy to blame Donald Trump for the fracture of American society along the faultlines of race, wealth, politics, and religion. But we all know that those faultlines were already there before he brazenly sucked the soul out of the Republican party and exploited social media to seduce millions more into his “Make America GreatContinue reading “Empathy and Human Salvation”

Dawn of a New Age

In The Progress of Wisdom and Curriculum Spiritus I offered a perspective on religion as the incubator of spiritual wisdom, discovered and clarified by our species over the millenniums of so-called higher culture.* I argued for what can be named the “originary principles” of wisdom, highlighting not only the historically original revelations by which theyContinue reading “Dawn of a New Age”

What Do You Want? (The Pyramid of Human Desires)

Let me start with a bold declaration. Each of us – every human being – wants to be healthy, happy, and in harmonious relationships with others and the world around us. Of course, we pursue many other things, like sex, wealth, power, status, and immortality, but these are only derivative and secondary as compared toContinue reading “What Do You Want? (The Pyramid of Human Desires)”

Who Tells America’s Story?

Our present era of “fake news” has introduced the American public to a key premise of constructivism, which is that meaning is constructed by human minds and always perspective-dependent. What we call “news” is someone’s perspective on what happened and what it means. Until now we have counted on the news media to tell usContinue reading “Who Tells America’s Story?”