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Buddhism blog posts

I took refuge, aka became a Buddhist, in August 2011. I had been reading about Buddhism for over a decade before that. I also started writing about Buddhism on this blog way before I became an official Buddhist.

The present and future of Buddhism – plus a contest :)

I’ve recently been put on Shambhala’s list of book reviewers which is great. I mean, they’re the top Buddhist publisher and one of the top spiritual publishers. Anyhow, they sent me three books for review this month – and I get to offer one to my readers. Read on to know what you can do [...]

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What’s the goal of the spiritual path?

I got three books in the mail this week… Two from Quest publishing, the Theosophical Publishing House of the TS Adyar in the US, another from an author herself. All three are about what one might call ‘the spiritual path‘. Two are highly personal accounts of people on the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff, one was [...]

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Free will, karma and reincarnation

It’s an often asked question: how much free will do we have, if karma rules our lives? I usually answer: Karma rules our circumstances, our potential, our habits. Karma does not rule what we do with all that today. What we do today: thoughts, emotions, insights, words and deeds creates new karma. Let’s back up [...]

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Being halfway a Buddhist – what’s a real Buddhist?

I said in my blogpost about whether Buddhism was the best world religion (let alone win an award) that I was halfway a Buddhist myself. I got a question about that: what do I mean? A real Buddhist, in my view, and in the traditional Asian view, is someone who has taken refuge. That is, [...]

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The karma of disease and health

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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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 [...]

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Osel Hita Torres – aka Lama Osel goes on to make movies

This is a true story that someone emailed me because it reminded them of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s story. That is: someone raised to be a teacher, steps outside the tradition that he was brought up in to do something totally different. Lama Osel was born to Spanish parents, but brought up as the reincarnation of Thubten [...]

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Remembering Blavatsky – White Lotusday

On May 8th theosophists all over the world, whatever theosophical organization they belong to, commemorate Blavatsky’s passing on May 8th 1891. This day is called White Lotusday. Traditionally quotes from three texts are read: The Bhagavad Gita, The Voice of the Silence and Light of Asia. So here goes from chapter ten of the Bhagavad [...]

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The Dalai Lama – a peaceful response to violence

It is a good blogging tradition to pay attention to important dates. Today it is 50 years since His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet, because it was being occupied by Chinese forces. I’m not going to go into the whole story here. Follow the links in this post for more details. Got Enlightenment? [...]

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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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