While doing some research for
War & Grace, the final installment in my epic fantasy trilogy
Daughter of Light, I wrote
Sunburned: A Blog Series About Spirituality. The world I created in
Daughter of Light, the Whole, draws on my (somewhat limited) understanding of quantum theory. (I am no mathematician!) i.e. there is no Heaven or Hell, etc. in the Whole. The resolution of a mortal life is not judged with a standard of good or evil, right or wrong, but rather on the extent that consciousness has evolved and been integrated. Considering how our human view of religion and spirituality has evolved over the centuries has helped me finesse the arc of this third and final book in the trilogy.
In the meantime, I've been posting weekly links to meditation (& ecletic) spirituality things around the web ... because I really do believe it is all about evolving our consciousness—and meditation is one of the best ways to do that! The past few weeks, it's been tough to find articles worthy of sharing, but this week, I've found some great ones.
Enjoy!
Mystic Mantra: Sanyas - Art of meditation: I appreciate much of the insights shared in this article, particularly this: "The life has not to be in any way renounced but transformed. Renunciation is escapism, it is cowardliness. Till now you have worshipped cowards as saints. You have worshipped people who were not courageous enough to accept all the challenges of life. And there are millions of challenges — every moment is challenging. The coward escapes."—Osho.
Now, as a guru, Osho is as flawed as any other spiritual leader, but at least, like
Sri Aurobindo, he was intelligent enough, perhaps "in touch" enough, to throw off some of the tired dogma inherent in eastern "religion" that most prefer to call "philosophy" and discover/receive something unorthodox.
It baffles me when believers insist eastern philosophies/religions are far superior to western philosophy/religions. Really? They're both entrenched models that are as accurate as "The world is flat", i.e. when you're standing on the ground and looking about five feet in front of you, you might think that were you to just keep moving forward, one day you'd reach an edge ... and fall into oblivion! But when you're flying in outer space, planet Earth appears spherical. Hmmm. No matter what, the commonality between eastern and western religions is that bits of truth are littered with distortions, distortions we're still evolving to recognize. Zooming in, the texts are different, but when you zoom out, they're still filtered, canonized perceptions of the things we still really don't fully understand, like "What is the essence that animates us, and to what purpose?"
For whatever reason, we humans like to cling to our pasts, and that desire persists equally in the lifeboat of holy texts promulgating both eastern and western religions/philosophies.
Was that a rant? Possibly.
Deepak Chopra: Spirituality in Business is Profitable: Some folks decry the idea of secularizing spirituality but there really shouldn't even be a line between the two, should there?
How Spirituality helps us grow in a physical world?: Yes! We're multi-dimensional beings. Currently, I perceive a continuum of consciousness: awake in daily life, daydreaming in daily life, imagining in daily life, meditating in daily life, the dreams we experience while asleep, and asleep. So, I agree that the dreams we dream at night might be a reflection of the depth—or lack of depth—to which we've integrated our life experiences within in our consciousness.
Winner of teaching award says children benefit from yoga, meditation, and mindfulness: Hopeful.
Seeing Spirituality in Chimpanzees: I posted a link to an earlier article regarding this subject by a different writer a few weeks back (see
Volume 9). Although King is a sceptic, I was thrilled to see her point to Donovan Schaefer's work,
Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, and that as a result of reading the book, she was willing to reconsider opening a door she'd previously closed. After all, opening a door we'd previously closed is something that an evolving consciousness demands from time to time.
