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Merry Christmas

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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Spiritual evolution, cycles, 2012 and wisdom

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 [...]

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About the Importance of Religious Symbols

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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Organized religion versus science and atheism

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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Man the Measure of All Things, Sri Krishna Prem and Sri Madhava Ashish

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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Harry Potter and the Spiritual Quest

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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There is no danger that dauntless courage cannot conquer

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, [...]

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Unity in diversity – about a holistic approach

Last week I ended with the conclusion that causality in this universe can best be described as pluralistic. But I could not leave it at that, because the traditional spiritual approach – in East AND West – is that there is unity behind all that diversity. Christians and Muslims call that unity God, in Vedanta [...]

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Upward, downward and pluralistic causation

Going on with my exploration of Creative Evolution by Amit Goswami. This time I’m going to explore the basic metaphysics of his theory a bit, specifically causation. Does consciousness cause everything (Goswami)? Or matter (classic scientism)? Or something else? Let’s start with a history of science lesson: old Newtonian physics relied on what is called [...]

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Tangled hierarchies and the creative evolution of consciousness

The core of Amit Goswami’s argument in his ‘Creative Evolution’ is that consciousness is an active force in ‘creation’. And at the heart of that argument is the argument of tangled hierarchies. I had to reread what he says about it to be able to halfway understand, so I’ll just quote him here for easier [...]

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