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Katinka - Spirituality
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January 27th, 2010
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 [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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January 20th, 2010
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, [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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December 14th, 2009
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 [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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December 9th, 2009
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 [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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November 9th, 2009
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 [...]
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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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September 8th, 2009
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 [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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September 1st, 2009
The relationship between karma and disease is a controversial one. There is the common sense view that since disease is unwelcome, it ‘must be’ bad karma. On the other hand there is a long tradition of theosophical thought saying that bad karma doesn’t exist. I was reading up on a related topic this summer and [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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August 10th, 2009
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 [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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June 8th, 2009
Blavatsky was rather fond of the concept of ‘black magic’ and I’ve had this on my list of topics to write about ever since I started this blog. But it’s a difficult topic, a messy one. For one thing – I’m not too happy about labeling people, especially into such (literally) black and white categories. [...]
