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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 preparing [...]

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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 merge [...]

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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 we [...]

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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, beset [...]

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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 of [...]

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Follow your own path – spiritual virtue no.4

Following ‘the path’ was once such an important spiritual ideal in the Theosophical Society that Jiddu Krishnamurti took it upon himself to break it down. (After first having written a whole prose poem about it ‘The Path‘) I’m not sure though whether the path itself was the issue, but the here and now. I’m sure [...]

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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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