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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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The certainty of truth

Many people believe in old myths that contradict other beliefs and scientific evidence, and this causes division. Religious dogmas and myths were created before people had the benefit of modern science. Science attempts to objectively discover how life works, and religion attempts to subjectively find a way to live in harmony with life, so they both have [...]

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Free will, culture and responsibility

There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, wealth… But most aside from genes, all those are the product of people acting on each other. The free will debate can also be framed as a responsibility debate. Who is responsible? If there is no free will, does [...]

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When yoga increases stress: about the teacher

Yoga is generally sold online and off as a great stress reliever. I can vouch for that: with the right teacher, yoga can be very healthy emotionally. I’ve often come away from a yoga class with a great big smile on my face that was certainly not there before. However, last week when I was [...]

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Is spirituality a lifestyle or a quest?

I have been pondering recently the difference between spirituality as a life style and spirituality as a quest. Consider the following Blavatsky quote (the modernized English is mine) from The Voice of the Silence, The Seven Portals: Before you stand on the threshold of the path; before you cross the foremost Gate, you have to [...]

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What annoys me in others is what I need to look at in myself?

It’s very common basic spiritual and psychological advice that ‘That which annoys me in others is a mirror of what I need to look at in myself’. (@verna_maruata) Well, I thought I’d look at that a bit more today. I think it’s probably true: what annoys us in other people is likely to be something [...]

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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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Seduction, advertisement and black magic…

The advantage of having a spiritual blog are, among other things, that I get free copies of spiritual books occasionally. So far that’s limited to spiritual fiction though, in my case. And it’s not exactly the best fiction I get sent home for free either. I recently received ‘The Happy Soul Industry‘ by Steffan Postaer. [...]

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Environmentally aware – spiritual virtue no. 7

Is this a cliche? Is environmental consciousness a central spiritual value? Or is it only a virtue when people act on it? In any way it’s the most modern of values on my list. A century ago the concept hardly existed – although of cource air and water pollution are as old as the industrial [...]

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Generosity and detachment – spiritual virtue no. 5

Generosity is, for once, a classic virtue. In Islam it’s called Zakat: the duty to give a percentage of your possessions to the poor. Generosity is linked to another classic virtue: detachment. In both Hinduism and Buddhism attachment to stuff, money and status is seen as a problem. Letting go of that in the form [...]

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