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Katinka - Spirituality
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September 24th, 2009
I have been pondering recently the difference between spirituality as a life style and spirituality as a quest. Consider the following Blavatsky quote (the modernized English is mine) from The Voice of the Silence, The Seven Portals:
Before you stand on the threshold of the path; before you cross the foremost Gate, you have to merge [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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August 17th, 2009
I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog analyzing the Law of Attraction, aka ‘The Secret’. One of the issues that keeps coming up for those who spend (in my opinion) too much time on this law, is how to translate the dream into reality. Or as one member of the LOA forum says [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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May 27th, 2009
Traditionally the main religions have advocated renunciation in one form or another. Whether it’s the fasting for Lent or the day time fast in Ramadan – lay people have been stimulated to restrain their appetites at one time in the year. For religious professionals – like monks, nuns and priests – renunciation was a full [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 18th, 2009
The advantage of having a spiritual blog are, among other things, that I get free copies of spiritual books occasionally. So far that’s limited to spiritual fiction though, in my case. And it’s not exactly the best fiction I get sent home for free either. I recently received ‘The Happy Soul Industry‘ by Steffan Postaer. [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 12th, 2009
Is this a cliche? Is environmental consciousness a central spiritual value? Or is it only a virtue when people act on it? In any way it’s the most modern of values on my list. A century ago the concept hardly existed – although of cource air and water pollution are as old as the industrial [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 10th, 2009
Generosity is, for once, a classic virtue. In Islam it’s called Zakat: the duty to give a percentage of your possessions to the poor.
Generosity is linked to another classic virtue: detachment. In both Hinduism and Buddhism attachment to stuff, money and status is seen as a problem. Letting go of that in the form of [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 4th, 2009
Of all the virtues and values I’m discussing in this series, thinking for yourself is probably the least ’spiritual’. A lot of people associate spirituality more with ‘intuition’ (or even emotion as some have noted in the comments) than with thinking. Yet thinking for yourself is a central concept in many new religious movements. It [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 3rd, 2009
In my series about spiritual values I want to start out with a virtue that is perhaps the strongest ideal in the series.
Is freedom a virtue? In a traditional religious setting taking responsibility would be considered a virtue. Freedom and responsibility can’t be separated. Those who have freedom, have a lot of responsibility. With responsibility [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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February 2nd, 2009
Auch. That was way too long a title.
Anyhow, I was thinking about some of the responses to my post about the difference between religion and spirituality (and how little difference there is). While I don’t agree with Jan Peter for instance – spirituality is more than something emotional – I do think I know what [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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January 28th, 2009
Spiritual people often say that they don’t like ‘religion’. They want nothing to do with religious organizations. What they usually mean is, as far as I can gather, that they want nothing to do with Christian organizations, or dogmas. Every other religious organisation is just lumped in the bag of ‘bad’, without the person having [...]
