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Becoming awake for others: Bodhicitta or the Bodhisattva Motivation

It’s time to blog about what they call in Tibetan Buddhism the ‘large scope’ in the Lam Rim. On one level this scope is the only one which we, as Westerners can relate to: it’s all about universal and impartial love. We can think of Christ, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai [...]

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What we say, do, think and feel – why action matters

“Good intentions aren’t enough. It’s not what we want, say, or think that makes things happen; it’s what we do.” Michael Josephson I remember a friend who promised to visit me time and again – yet never made it to my door. There was always some reason not to make it. This was before mobile [...]

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Selfish, unselfish, ‘love yourself’, love your neighbour

We’ve all heard it before: you can only love other people, if you love yourself. People saying that are generally speaking not the kind I personally take very seriously. However, as one reader told me in response to my last post (on my Dutch blog), I sounded just like them for a bit. I guess [...]

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Teaching people a lesson, in real life…

That’s me. Or used to be. I hope. I’m not talking about what the saying ‘teaching them a lesson’ has come to mean in every day speak. I don’t mean deliberately sabotaging things, or setting people up to fail or anything like that. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been facing up to [...]

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Paradoxes of Giving

I’ve pondered for a while the psychological paradox that democrats give less to charity than republicans, that those who eat environmentally friendly food are similarly ungenerous, on average. I’ve not written about this issue before, because it’s so easy to be judgmental about it … Those goody two shoes people aren’t so good after all… [...]

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Alzheimers and spiritual growth

A reader asked (in Dutch): As a social worker in a nursing home I had a conversation last week with the wife of a gentleman living on our psych-ward. This lady appeared not to need the most common forms of support in dealing with the loss of her husband through dementia. She didn’t need information [...]

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Using spirituality and psychology as a defence

1) Someone asking me to become a lecturer on an event asked me about karma: I hear people saying, about someone else, that their ill health or poverty is ‘bad karma’. Tell that to the starving child in Africa. She was right of course. 2) I heard a longtime Krishnamurti student saying: Your whole work [...]

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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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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 [...]

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