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Ritual as part of a spiritual practice: Tibetan Buddhism

Over the past year I’ve gained some experience at (Gelugpa Tibetan) Buddhist ritual. As a born agnostic from a protestant background rituals don’t sit very well with me. In fact, before hand I was planning to select the Buddhist lineage in part on the amount of ritual it involved. Funnily enough I ended up with [...]

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Baby steps or big changes – about self control and habit

When I was 21 I decided I needed to work on my social skills. Instead of getting a hobby or something I quit university and decided to get a job. My parents weren’t amused and the result was that I went for a community college nursing class, which I was kicked out of within a [...]

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Certainty, uncertainty and spirituality

I have been in a very neti-neti (not this, not that) mood for a while now, in terms of what I share on this blog. Not channeling, Not Krishnamurti, Not ideals… If you add in the topics I’ve considered writing about there’s even more: not merely God, not merely Goddess… But I’ve gone further: what [...]

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You are your Soul Mate, Rick Singer

[guest post] Within your own house dwells the treasure of joy, So why do you go begging from door to door. Chinese proverb As human beings we are consistently involved in an endless search for something external to fill the void within us. We search for the perfect partner or our Soul mate, with the [...]

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Ideals, moral issues and psychology

Ideals are tricky things: on the one hand they help us aspire to being something better than we are, which is a good thing. On the other hand, when we can’t live up to them the result is not so good. Because, if you don’t live up to your ideals you start feeling guilty, beating [...]

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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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The unsaid basics of meditation and life

What we all do when we start something, when we do something, when we try something, when we read something, when we respond to something… is bring ourselves into it. I was a bit baffled by some of the responses to my post about the unsaid things about meditation. And what it was is this: [...]

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Blavatsky’s Psychology

The title of this piece is rather ambitious. I’m not going to go in depth into this topic right now: I’m sure there is enough material on the topic to write a book about, which I might just end up writing. Just not today. Usually when theosophists talk about Madame Blavatsky’s psychology, which implicitly they [...]

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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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Why is self control important?

Having struggled for years with a chocolate addiction, I know the territory well. I used to eat one bar of chocolate a day. I slowly lowered that to zero chocolate. Then, a few years ago, I decided to go easy on myself and allow myself one bar (200gr) a week. I stray a bit above [...]

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