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Why doesn’t the dream add up to the reality?

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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Will, diet, renunciation and religion

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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Seduction, advertisement and black magic…

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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Environmentally aware – spiritual virtue no. 7

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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Generosity and detachment – spiritual virtue no. 5

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 [...]

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Thinking for yourself – spiritual virtue no. 2

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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Freedom – spiritual virtue, value or norm no. 1

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 [...]

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Spiritual virtues / values / norms: perspective on alternative spirituality

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 [...]

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Religion, what is it? Spirituality?

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 [...]

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Individualism: spiritual or not?

I’ve just been redoing a collection of holistic videos and they reminded me: one and all, just how interconnected we all are. Yet spiritual growth is an individual process. It’s so individual in fact that the Dutch newspapers had a debate a few months ago about whether or not spirituality was in fact selfish. It’s [...]

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