In The Story That Got You Here I reviewed the developmental journey that started with your physical attachment to Mother, gave way to emotional attachment to your mother and other family members, and continued to advance with your intellectual attachment, in the form of beliefs, to the worldview of your tribe and larger culture. ThisContinue reading “Two Things About the World You Need to Know”
Tag Archives: mysticism
A Psychology of Wholeness
I’m sure that no other species of life, on Earth at least, is as obsessed with understanding itself as are we. We’ve been trying to figure out this human experience for millenniums now, but time and again we get tangled up in our own reflection. Realistically speaking, there really is no hope of ever reachingContinue reading “A Psychology of Wholeness”
Two Steps Back
Just now world leaders are telling us it’s time to close our borders and load our guns. With all the loonies and radicalized nut-jobs out there, we need to make security our highest priority. Inside our own nation, subgroups are putting tribal loyalty above the common good, as political parties, religious sects, and social classesContinue reading “Two Steps Back”
It’s Not All About You
The holiday season affords fresh opportunities for us to get poked, when others get to see sides of us that, in normal and less stressful times, we manage to keep off-stage. A combination of spending money we don’t really have, fighting traffic on the streets and in stores, and gathering with family members who knowContinue reading “It’s Not All About You”
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”
The Universe as Your Self
A coworker recently confessed to a change of mind on the question of whether people are fundamentally generous or selfish. The election of a new US president who is an outspoken advocate of capitalism, and equally outspoken with his opinions against certain demographics and protecting the biosphere, has made her wonder if maybe the darker sideContinue reading “The Universe as Your Self”
Journey Back to Reality
Just as soon as I make a case for the necessity of religion, it’s time to insist on our need to transcend it. If my atheist friends squirm at my insistence that we all have a religion – a system of beliefs, attitudes, values and practices that links the separate ego back to reality – my friends whoContinue reading “Journey Back to Reality”
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”
Opening the Present
Spirituality is about living mindfully in the here-and-now. Of course, there is nowhere else we can be, but we all know how easy it is to live mindlessly in the present. Most of us are less quick to admit how much we prefer to live outside the present moment – rummaging through the past or chasing after theContinue reading “Opening the Present”