» Home » Spiritual Growth

From the category archives:

Spiritual Growth

Free will, freedom and philosophy series

Over the past month or so I’ve written about freedom and free will. It has turned out to be a difficult subject to discuss. Here are the posts in the order I wrote them:

Free will, culture and responsibility
There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, wealth… But [...]

Read the full article →

Free will: mind or emotion?

We’ve been discussing free will, and whether we have freedom or not, for a while now. The discussion has, as I’ve noted before, not been very clear. Either the topic is just plain difficult, or the right approach has not been found yet. Perhaps the following may help:
When philosophers discussed free will in the past, [...]

Read the full article →

The freedom of the experience of our lives

The ultimate freedom philosophers talk about, especially existential philosophers, is not so much the world, but our experience of the world. In the words of psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom:
Nothing in the world has significance except by virtue of one’s own creation. There are no rules, no ethical systems, no values; there is no external referent [...]

Read the full article →

How hard is it to discuss free will?

I have loads of notes waiting to be turned into blogposts on the topic of free will, which is why I decided to write a series of posts about the topic. But first I want to note an observation about the comments to my first post in the series last week.
First off: neither the Dutch, [...]

Read the full article →

Michael Mirdad interview

As promised, here’s some questions I had for Michael Mirdad, author of ‘You’re Not Going Crazy…You’re Just Waking Up! The Five Stages of Soul Transformation Process’, and his answers.
1. You say that nearly every process of learning is ultimately about understanding and experiencing greater levels of unconditional love (p. 14). What do you mean by [...]

Read the full article →

The five stages of the soul transformation process: Michael Mirdad

Two weeks ago I wrote about spiritual evolution from the perspective of long term cycles. This week I will go into the more practical day to day questions relating to our own soul transformation process. Personally I can’t take 2012 seriously enough worry about it. I do however have to deal with personal challenges just [...]

Read the full article →

10 simple mindfulness exercises

I was eating at an Ethiopian restaurant yesterday. For those not familiar with that cuisine, the food is served on thin pancakes and one is supposed to eat one’s dinner with the right hand. For me it was a painful exercise in overcoming my conditionings. The table went quiet: a measure of the concentration we [...]

Read the full article →

Is spirituality a lifestyle or a quest?

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 [...]

Read the full article →

What annoys me in others is what I need to look at in myself?

It’s very common basic spiritual and psychological advice that ‘That which annoys me in others is a mirror of what I need to look at in myself’. (@verna_maruata) Well, I thought I’d look at that a bit more today.
I think it’s probably true: what annoys us in other people is likely to be something we [...]

Read the full article →

What’s normal – about conditioning

Religion and social pressure are two sides of the same coin. Religion gives meaning to our lives, shapes our actions – which means that people who let their lives be shaped by other pressures than our own, are by definition strange. Hard to deal with. This comes out, in the USA, in people pretending they’re [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries