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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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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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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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Did Buddhism win the best Religion of the world award?

There’s a rumor going about a lot of blogs that Buddhism wins the best religion of the world reward. Unfortunately it’s only blogs that are reporting this. No ordinary news sources, nor can I find the ‘Icarus’ foundation that is said to have given the award because: “It wasn’t a surprise to me that Buddhism [...]

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Will, diet, renunciation and religion

Traditionally the main religions have advocated renunciation in one form or another. Whether it’s the fasting for Lent or the day time fast in Ramadan – lay people have been stimulated to restrain their appetites at one time in the year. For religious professionals – like monks, nuns and priests – renunciation was a full [...]

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Sorrow, stress and spirituality

My mom said good bye to her day job last week. She’s a psychotherapist and had invited a Dutch professor, Dr. Ruart Ganzevoort, who talked about men, spirituality and trauma. (One of my moms specialties was working with men and lately, traumatized men). It was a very interesting lecture and brought home to me something [...]

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Freedom – spiritual virtue, value or norm no. 1

In my series about spiritual values I want to start out with a virtue that is perhaps the strongest ideal in the series. Is freedom a virtue? In a traditional religious setting taking responsibility would be considered a virtue. Freedom and responsibility can’t be separated. Those who have freedom, have a lot of responsibility. With [...]

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Spiritual virtues / values / norms: perspective on alternative spirituality

Auch. That was way too long a title. Anyhow, I was thinking about some of the responses to my post about the difference between religion and spirituality (and how little difference there is). While I don’t agree with Jan Peter for instance – spirituality is more than something emotional – I do think I know [...]

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Religion, what is it? Spirituality?

Spiritual people often say that they don’t like ‘religion’. They want nothing to do with religious organizations. What they usually mean is, as far as I can gather, that they want nothing to do with Christian organizations, or dogmas. Every other religious organisation is just lumped in the bag of ‘bad’, without the person having [...]

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A universal and mature spirituality – what is it?

One of the reasons why I’m into theosophy is that it is an attempt at a universal spirituality. That is: it aims at finding the universal core in all religions and spiritual traditions. Why is this important? Well – in this age of globalization no well informed adult can ignore that there are people outside [...]

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