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Katinka - Spirituality
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January 13th, 2010
There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, wealth… But most aside from genes, all those are the product of people acting on each other. The free will debate can also be framed as a responsibility debate. Who is responsible? If there is no free will, does [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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January 1st, 2010
The Dec. 2009 issue of Scientific American seems unusually boring at first sight. At a more thorough reading though, it has some interesting tidbits relevant to this blog:
A bouncy universe
Recent theoretical physics calculations by Horava split time from space in the General Theory of Relativity. The result is that cosmologically it’s no longer a big [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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December 21st, 2009
I’m not the best at reminding myself to attend to holiday greetings, but this year I’m so wrapped up in preparing for Christmas, that I had to remember to give you all my greetings too. Quite suitably, today is the day of the winter solstice – when earth, sun and the centre of the galaxy [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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November 26th, 2009
This is a bit of a rambling post. I hope you’ll enjoy a few of the nuggets I’ve gathered together.
In classic theosophy it’s explained that one reason to assume there are wise sages is simply to extrapolate from the presence of wise people in general. Similarly: because our society is so obviously more advanced in [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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October 28th, 2009
The first ‘lecture’ I ever gave, I gave for a very private audience: a few members of the Groningen lodge of the Theosophical Society. I was about 19 and still, ostensibly, studying chemistry. One of my fellow students went along. My main point that evening was that the importance of symbols was as a starting [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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October 21st, 2009
This is one of those topics that just never seems to get stale online. mergyeugnau shared some of her insights on twitter just now that I feel are a mirror of what many out there are feeling about this topic. So, before her tweets get lost in the internet dustbin, here they are including my [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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October 7th, 2009
I’ve just discovered an old classic whose title I have heard and read mentioned time and again. It’s a classic for a reason. There’s hardly a sentence that doesn’t add insight or new perspective. I’m talking about Man The Measure of All Things, by Sri Krishna Prem and Sri Madhava Ashish. I suspect this book [...]
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Katinka - Spirituality
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September 29th, 2009
Every once in a while I like to share with you all some of what I have on my website. Today it’s a long overdue post about Harry Potter and how one can interpret his magical adventures from a spiritual perspective. It makes sense to start with what Helene Vachet has to say about Harry [...]
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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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July 22nd, 2009
The title of this post is a Blavatsky quote that was retweeted amongst some of my followers on twitter for a while. Her full name is Helena (or Elena) Petrovna Blavatsky (or Blavatskaya) by the way, not Helena Petronova Blavatsky. Here’s the full quote, quite popular among theosophists.
There is a road, steep and thorny, beset [...]
