Category Archives: Spirituality - Page 4

An interesting meditation article

I came across this article on the web the other day and thought I’d share it.

This is an article by a gap year student who spent time in a Buddhist monastery entirely unplanned. 

I’ve always emphasised the positive power of meditation and have an interesting project coming up that I hope will prove a hit with current SitQuietly users and Windows and Mac folks who haven’t been able to install it. 

I’ve also recently started venturing into Chakra work as well, which I’m finding to be a source of positive results.  I’ll write more about both of these things as they take shape.

A new essay

I wrote this a week or two ago and left it be for a while.  I can’t seem to think of anything else that needs changing, so here it is.

This essay covers my personal views on dogmatic religion, with a focus on the source of said dogma.

You can find it in the links on the right of the screen or just click here.

As per usual, I’ll probably revisit this theme and further expand and clarify my thoughts in later posts as well.

Walking the dog

A lighter post than the one I was expecting to make, but what the heck.

I’ve been looking after a friends house this weekend, also with the house come one or two animals.  Her dog, Lady, needs plenty of exercise and I stepped up to the challenge.

I though I was fit, but I’ve had it proved to me again, that all that time in the gym does not mean you’re real world fit.  Thanks Lady.

What’s been of equal interest is to observe Lady as we’ve been walking.  She often stops to sniff, clearly privy to a world that I would have walked straight past.  It brought it home to me how much of our daily world we take for granted.  We walk round with our heads in the clouds without realising that there could easily be a whole layer of the world there that we are blind to.

Walking the dog as spirituality, I never would have thought of it!

Getting worse and worse

I’ve been watching the recent antics of some of the Church of England clergy recently with a sense of shaking my head and sighing.  The sight of our state religion (don’t get me started on seperation of church and state) descending into farce is in equal parts amusing and sobering.

This article from BBC News covers the latest development, and the comments thread under “Have Your Say” is well worth a browse.  I’ve written before about my view that women have an absolutely vital positive role in human spirituality, and also my views on gender roles.

So, this along with the attitude to gay clergy is quite frankly where I begin to wonder if the Anglicans realise that they’ll come out of this looking quite so shabby, it’s sobering to realise that some of them may not.

I can certainly see the point that people project their own fears and inadequacies through their god for psychological reasons.  A sexist, racist or homophobe could (and do) do that, it makes sense as a tactic from their point of view.  The most interesting investigation would into their reasons for doing so, why they fear so these thing so much.  I think that their time would be better spent coming to terms with their own fears and insecurities, rather than making everyone elses live miserable.

Anyway, there’s something I think needs to be done and as luck would have it someone else has done it already.  To help answer and dismiss the charge that half the human race is less worthy spiritually than the other I offer this essay, which covers women in the early church.

Interesting, yes?  Especially the part about the Gospel of Luke, which shows the approach of Jesus in more detail.  This disregarding of the example of their religions’ founder is not new.  I’ll have a think before I post again, as I have more to say on that, which will unfortunately need a more confrontational post than my usual modus operandi.

A few thoughts on Karma

I was working to this post for some time, but recent media coverage of comments by Sharon Stone prompted me to put fingers to keyboard. 

Now, let me start by making a point, I’m not taking a pop at her, enough people have already done that and it’s not really served any purpose.  She made some points that I agree with:

“It was a big lesson to me that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who aren’t nice to you.”

As a servicedesk analyst I can vouch for the above from personal experience and from the experience of my colleagues past and present.  I will be going a little deeper into my insights from my POV as a headset jockey in a future post.  Also, I agree with her following sentiment:

“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else.”  

So, what are my views on Karma?  I view it in a secular manner, not as a supernatural phenomenon.  It comes down to simple cause and effect and is in part psychological conditioning, or to quote Marcus Aurelius:

 ”Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. Soak it then in such trains of thoughts as, for example: Where life is possible at all, a right life is possible.”

Essentially, you create you own Karma by your attitudes, which create your actions, the results of which colour your attitudes in a continuous feedback cycle.  You don’t really need past or future lives for Karmic Law to be valid, the above quote makes it perfectly clear to me, the consequences of your Karma will be played out in the moment with every thought and action.

Science and Buddhism

Now here’s an interesting piece. “The Neural Buddhists” is an opinion piece in the New York Times, which caught my attention and I have to say I find myself in agreement with the author.

I’ve long felt that hardcore materialism doesn’t have all the answers, but at the same time neither does hardcore bible thumping theism. My focus has always been in the direction of a flexible positive spirituality, not restrictive guilt mongering or the complete denial of our spiritual side, neither fear nor denial seem particularly useful to me.

We have had scientific evidence backing the positive effect of meditation, and after reading the NYT piece above, I’ve got a definite feeling that this is going to get very interesting!

Interesting Quote

I was wandering the web looking through green sites, peak oil sites and other things and I came across a couple of quotes which I like:

“Of all the qualities in your being, that which is most god-like is creativity” – Pir Ilayat Vilayat Khan

I too think that our creativity is our greatest asset, it’s what makes us both the most brilliant and the most dangerous of animals.