Being You

Take a few moments to reflect on the difference between what your life means and how it feels to be alive. The meaning of your life isn’t simply a given, is it? Instead, it is something you have to think about. Indeed, thinking about what your life means is itself the very process whereby itsContinue reading “Being You”

Diving Deep, Flying High

A lot has happened to get us to this point, where I have written something for you to read and think about. Fourteen or so billion years ago a quantum singularity broke open to release a burst of infinite energy and give birth to our universe. Within seconds this highly unstable state began to collapseContinue reading “Diving Deep, Flying High”

Spiritual Intelligence

Spiritual intelligence (SQ) has nothing to do with religious orthodoxy, how much you know about metaphysics, or whether you possess super-normal abilities like yogic flying, seeing into the future, or bending spoons with your mind. Maybe it’s because I can’t do any of those things, that I define spiritual intelligence without appealing to special gifts. AsContinue reading “Spiritual Intelligence”

Stepping Back For the Big Picture

From time to time it’s important to take a step back from the detail work of theory-building in order to catch hold of the big picture of what you’re doing. I’ve offered up some wide-ranging ideas on such topics as consciousness, spirituality, post-theism, and human self-actualization, and now I’ll try to bring together the majorContinue reading “Stepping Back For the Big Picture”

Matter, Life, Spirit

One of the challenges we face as we advance deeper into a secular and global reality is how to redefine the terms ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘spirituality’ so they can have relevance to life today. While they carried metaphorical meaning in a mythopoetic reality, and were converted into a supernatural and metaphysical realm above or apart fromContinue reading “Matter, Life, Spirit”

A Spirituality of Religion

The separation of spirituality from religion is a best-selling topic these days, particularly as religion continues to impress us with its tendencies toward conviction, bigotry, and violence – and complacency. More and more people are either dropping out or quietly declaring themselves “spiritual but not religious.” In previous posts I have tried to make a caseContinue reading “A Spirituality of Religion”

Creative Spirit and the Invitation to Life in Its Fullness

Matter reacts. Life adapts. Spirit creates.  With that, I have summarized the 14-billion-year cosmic process in three stages and just six words. I’m using the term ‘stage’ here less in its temporal sense than as a way of identifying distinct levels of complexity in the evolutionary architecture of our universe. True enough, energy first fused into matter, then stirred toContinue reading “Creative Spirit and the Invitation to Life in Its Fullness”

Two Small, Really Big Words

Watts: “If we want to keep the old language, still using such terms as ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’, the spiritual must mean ‘the indefinable’, that which, because it is living, must ever escape the framework of any fixed form. Matter is spirit named.” Question: Why would we want to keep the “old language”? If it’s increasinglyContinue reading “Two Small, Really Big Words”