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Signs of spiritual enlightenment and spiritual awakening, Ananda and bliss – Video

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Signs of spiritual enlightenment and spiritual awakening, Ananda and bliss
Signs of spiritual awakening and spiritual enlightenment and the experience of Ananda, Satori, Moksha or bliss are plentiful. My web site http://www.EnlightenmentHo...

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Signs of spiritual enlightenment and spiritual awakening, Ananda and bliss - Video

Love What Arises teacher comes to Nevada County

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Rev. Jerry Farrell woke up at Matt Kahns retreat last fall in Portland with a sinking feeling.

The night before, Kahn, a Pacific Northwest-based empath and healer who is garnering international attention for his YouTube videos, had announced that he just signed a book and DVD deal with Colorado-based holistic publishing company Sounds True. Kahns book and DVDs are expected to be published this fall.

Hes never going to come to Grass Valley now, Farrell, lead minister at Unity in the Gold Country Spiritual Center in Grass Valley, recalled thinking.

Still feeling discouraged, Farrell got dressed and came out of the retreat lodging space. He immediately saw Kahn walking toward him up the pathway.

He didnt say hello or anything, Farrell said. He looked straight at me and said, No matter how big I get, Im still coming to Grass Valley.

And so it is. Kahn, who is booked for private sessions through February 2016 and whose videos are viewed by thousands, will come to Unity for a Soul Gathering at 12:15 p.m. on Sunday, April 26. Joining him will be partner Julie Dittmar, a sound healer and meditation teacher.

Tickets, which went on sale earlier this week, are already half sold-out, Farrell said. (see box for ticket information or go to http://truedivinenature.com.) The Grass Valley appearance, and two sessions in Berkeley the prior Friday and Saturday, are Kahns only Northern California stops this year. Kahn will also attend Unitys 10:30 a.m. Sunday service at the church at 180 Cambridge Court.

He has this way of distilling centuries of spiritual teaching, Farrell said of Kahn, whom he credits with sharing a practical spirituality that is accessible to everyone.

Weve all been told, love yourself, love your neighbor, Farrell said. But no one has defined it so specifically, in the moment, when youre having an experience, as to this is how you love yourself.

In Kahns world, every thought and feeling no matter how negative or hurtful is an opportunity to extend love to the one who is feeling it.

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Love What Arises teacher comes to Nevada County

Online Rabbinical School Celebrates a New Class of Graduates: Eighth Class of Students Ordained in Delray Beach

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New York, NY (PRWEB) January 21, 2015

The Jewish Spiritual Leadership Institute (JSLI) Online Rabbinical School conducted its eighth ordination Saturday night at a ceremony in Delray Beach, FL. Eleven new rabbis will now begin their respective missions and service as teachers and spiritual leaders some advancing the tenets of the Jewish Universalism.

The ordination/Shabbaton weekend provides a marvelous opportunity for scholarship and discussion,meals and conviviality and concludes with the converyance of Rabbinical Ordination, Semicha, to the students, said Rabbi Steve Blane, founder of the Sim Shalom Online Synagogue and Dean of the Rabbinical School. The presentation of the semicha or certificate of ordination denotes a time for celebration of achievement, and contemplation of the future. Sim Shalom, the Online Jewish Universalist synangogue, is the ordaining body of JSLI.

The Hebrew meaning of semicha (sometimes spelled as semikhah) is literally a leaning of the hands" and is derived from the Hebrew word which means "to rely on" or "to be authorized." Within the context of rabbinical ordination, its connotation is that of a transmission of rabbinical authority enabling the holder to give advice or interpretation of Jewish law. The classical line of semicha traces a line of Torah conferment back to Moses and the 70 elders.

The 11 new graduates of JSLI hail from all over the United States and the United Kingdom. JSLI alumni are currently serving worldwide in congregations, as pastoral counselors, and as Jewish educators. They perform a full panoply of Life Cycle events including weddings, funerals, and bnai mitzvoth.

Jewish Universalism encompasses the ideal of peaceful existence between adherents of different religions and religious denominations.

And now our conveyed and ever-evolving process of education and enlightenment begins again, noted Rabbi Blane. We have ten new students entering the schools next rabbinical class embracing the opportunity for a life of personal spiritual development, and service to humanity.

About Sim Shalom

Sim Shalom is an interactive online Jewish Universalist synagogue which is liberal in thought and traditional in liturgy. Created in 2009 by Rabbi Steven Blane on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Sim Shalom offers a means of connecting the unconnected. Rabbi Blane leads accessible and short Kabbalt Shabbat services every Friday night using a virtual interface and additionally Sim Shalom provides online education programs, Jazz concerts, conversion and life-cycle ceremonies along with weeknight services at 7:00PM EST led by Rabbis and students of this online community.

Rabbi Blane is also the founder and director of the Jewish Spiritual Leader's Institute, http://www.jsli.net, a professional second career online rabbinical school.

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Online Rabbinical School Celebrates a New Class of Graduates: Eighth Class of Students Ordained in Delray Beach

ELIOT | Cornells Standing Babas

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By CHRISTO ELIOT

There is a group of Hindu devotees in India called the Khareshwari, or the Standing Babas. A Baba vows to stand, and not sit or lie-down, for a number of years or the rest of his life. Babas will sleep standing up, using a sling that keeps his torso upright. Per a citation-less Wikipedia article, the vow is a form of corporal punishment that strives to bring about spiritual enlightenment, called Tapa in the Hindu religion.

I have never met and never really expect to meet a Standing Baba but was struck by how bizarrely and differently they practice their religion when I first encountered them in a novel Gregory David Roberts called Shantaram over break. Winter Break also provided me with the opportunity to listen to cereal, but I really did not get why putting your ear next to a bowl of Rice Krispies got so hyped up Shantaram was one of the first books I have read for pleasure in a while, and in that time I have not become any more comfortable with how sensual the term pleasure reading sounds and feels. That said, this novel which like any other novel is a unique arrangement of only 26 letters was the first one I have read with any Standing Babas.

There are a couple of stages a Baba will go through when he takes his vow. Likewise, a Cornell student will go through many stages as he or she navigates their academic careers most of them characterized by an overwhelming sense of pain.

For the first five or so years, a Babas legs will swell and bloat unrecognizably as their muscles are exhausted by constantly supporting his weight. After that, his legs atrophy to look like nothing more than popsicle sticks with skin spray-painted on and a withered web of veins. The process ends with the Babas feet becoming horribly disfigured and perpetual podiatric pain.

On the surface, there are not many analogies that can be easily drawn between the progression of the Standing Babas and that of Cornell undergraduates. In reality though, what a Baba goes through and what we go through have some interesting parallels. The most obvious one is the early weight gain. Just as a Babas legs have no choice but to swell up under constant compression, I was among one of many freshmen who didnt want but needed to get soft serve ice cream at every meal. As we move from introductory courses to more and more demanding ones, time becomes more and more precious. Sometimes meals need to be sacrificed and take a backseat to studies or even heading to a bar or a game of Settlers of Catan (ladies). Eventually we all leave Cornell with some battle wounds, like the torn up feet of the Babas, and hopefully achieve some form of spiritual enlightenment.

One of the most unbelievable parts of the Standing Babas is that each of them chooses to become one. Nobody forces any man to take the vows of the Khareshwari, but several dozen Hindus in India are drawn to it by the same force that calls priests, rabbis and imams. Many more choose to become a Baba as preparation for death and their next stage in reincarnation. Although many legacies may feel pressure from their parents to come to school here, students at Cornell all chose to matriculate. No individual was truly forced against their will to become a Cornellian, and most of us are here hoping it will help us throughout the stages in life that follow our time here.

Sometimes life at Cornell can be challenging. Sometimes the biting wind can be pretty painful, and the Mongo at RPCC gets repetitive. The Babas lives are painful, but their conviction that what they are doing is something worth doing helps them honor their vows. The Wall Street cliche is, There is no such thing as a free lunch. I am generally not a fan of cliches or Wall Street and am a pretty big fan of free lunches, but I think the idea that nothing worth having comes easy should resonate with almost all Cornell students. Although the school will test us and at times push us to our limits, even freshmens days here are numbered.

Looking down the barrel of my last semester at this school, I feel like a Baba nearing the end of his commitment. For the past four years, Cornell has been the keystone of my life (no pun intended). Cornell builds its students into impressive people and helps them develop strong characters. It does this not for our time at Cornell but for what comes after. I certainly am not looking forward to closing the chapter on the when I was in college era of my life, but finally sitting down after years of being a Cornell Baba is going to be refreshing.

Christo Eliot is a senior in the College of Engineering. He can be reached at celiot@cornellsun.com.The Tale of the Dingo at Midnightappears alternate Wednesdays this semester.

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ELIOT | Cornells Standing Babas

A new year, new spiritual you

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Samantha Schaefer-

Each day, the world is changing, creating a new world of its own, but this shift in time was not an end to humanity as we thought it might be, instead it was a shift in consciousness. Some call this period in time The Age of Spiritual Enlightenment. As we now reach 2015, this change will be extremely paramount to our existence on Earth and our evolution as a species. Involvement in this human ascendance not only provides personal reward, but also personal advantage.

Though the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason we learn about in most of our textbooks refers to the mid-18th century, it was also an age of Scientific Revolution when Western Europe emphasized reason and facts, rather than traditional establishments. This period was very important and involved the acceptance of different religions, philosophy and scientific research. Todays period of Enlightenment is far less materialistic and interpersonal, and far more individualistic and introspective. One might start to comprehend this new way of learning by first understanding the 18th century enlightenment, and then apply that philosophy to our new philosophy, parallel to what is going on globally today.

Spirituality is the process of transforming the self, increasingly oriented on subjective experience and personal growth, independent from any specific religious or cultural context. The great thing about spirituality is that it is foreveryone, no matter what background you come from or what religion you belong to. It can begin from something as simple as this years new-year resolution to something as complex as helping the poor. Be the change you wish to see in the world Gandhi stated over one-hundred years ago. The ideas of self-improvement and conscious shift are nothing new to us, but the act of actually beginning to do so in mass quantities yields improvement.

If you are new to spirituality, I can give you some suggestions to point you in the right direction. When you conquer your inner-issues, you can begin to take on the world. I recommend research and communication with those who inspire you and surrounding yourself with individuals who push you to do your best, rather than bringing you down to your lowest. I also recommend eating healthy so that your body can function according to your minds needs. Sometimes letting go of the negative aspects of our lives is the hardest thing to do, but this action will grant you wishes far more valuable than gold itself: the gift of peace and harmony, and the ability to spread these gifts with the rest of the world.

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A new year, new spiritual you

After Paris: Its time for a new Enlightenment

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The perpetrators of the unconscionable massacre of Charlie Hebdos journalists, and the gratuitous killing of French Jews at a supermarket, were the sort of young men who might have been little more than petty criminals in another era disaffected drifters who are now susceptible to the pied-pipers of jihad. They preen in the costume of the pious for their propaganda videos, and betray easily their very modern brand of criminality. The Paris murderers claimed to be redeeming the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, but they made the most venerated figure in Islam seem like a small-time mafia boss.

Yet many commentators on the attacks have revived the very broad discourse of the clash of civilisations, which was fatefully deployed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to justify the war on terror, and resulted in the latters catastrophic imprecisions. Once again the secular and democratic west, identified with the legacy of the Enlightenment reason, individual autonomy, freedom of speech has been called upon to subdue its perennially backward other: Islam.

Describing the murderers as soldiers in a war against freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to offend, the New Yorkers George Packer called for higher levels of counter-violence. Salman Rushdie claimed that religion, a medieval form of unreason, deserves our fearless disrespect. However, many other writers have rejected a binary of us-versus-them that elevates a vicious crime into a cosmic war between secular Enlightenment and religious barbarism. There is a specific context to the rise of jihadism in Europe, which involves Muslims from Europes former colonies making an arduous transition to secular modernity, and often colliding with its entrenched intellectual as well as political hierarchies: the opposition, for instance, between secularism and religion which was actually invented in Enlightenment Europe. Writers such as Hari Kunzru, Laila Lalami, and Teju Cole who have ancestral links to Europes former colonies have argued that the simplistic commentary on the attacks is another reminder that we must urgently re-examine these evidently self-sufficient notions from Europes past.

In many ways, it is this intellectual standoff rather than the terrorist attack that reveals a profound clash not between civilisations, or the left and the right, but a clash of old and new visions of the world in the space we call the west, which is increasingly diverse, unequal and volatile. It is not just secular, second-generation immigrant novelists who express unease over the unprecedented, quasi-ideological nature of the consensus glorifying Charlie Hebdos mockery of Islam and Muslims. Some Muslim schoolchildren in France refused to observe the minute-long silence for the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo mandated by French authorities.

It seems worthwhile to reflect, without recourse to the clash of civilisations discourse, on the reasons behind these striking harmonies and discords. Hannah Arendt anticipated them when she wrote that for the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present Every country has become the almost immediate neighbour of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe. Indeed, it may be imperative to explore this negative solidarity of mankind a state of global existence in which people from different pasts find themselves thrown together in a common present. For Arendt feared, correctly as it turns out, that this inescapable unity of the world might result in a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else.

Differences of opinion are particularly stark between people whose lives are marked by Europes still largely unacknowledged past of colonialism and slavery, and those who see metropolitan Europe as the apotheosis of modernity: the place that made the crucial breakthroughs in politics, science, philosophy and the arts. Such divergent experiences have long coexisted but they make for greater public discordance today. Europe no longer confidently produces, as it did for two centuries, the surplus of global history; and the people Europe once dominated now chafe against the norms produced by that history.

For many Anglophones, Paris has long evoked, from Henry Jamess The Ambassadors to a gamine Jean Seberg vending the Herald-Tribune in Godards Breathless, a dream of sensuous pleasure and intellectual freedom. But an indigent immigrant or asylum-seeker in Europe today might find himself echoing the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, whose encounters in the 1930s with Europes antisemitic bourgeoisie provoked him into angry generalisations about the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average western European. Roths sense of ostracism was echoed by those who came to Europe from its colonies. Jacques Derrida, who grew up poor and Jewish in French Algeria in the 1930s, said that he was exposed at school to a history of France that was a fable and a bible, but a semipermanent indoctrination for the children of my generation: it contained not a word about Algeria. Today, many of those naturalised Europeans who originally arrived in the continent as cheap labour mostly from countries Europe once ruled or dominated still cannot recognise themselves in their host countrys self-image.

Even in 2008, it was possible for the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, to announce in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, that Africans have remained close to nature and never really entered history. Many people so excluded from the history, politics, and economy of the modern world have manufactured their own partial or distorted historical views of Europe and the west. The righteous feeling of humiliation by foreigners has grown especially potent among many Muslims since the counter-violence after 9/11, which resulted in the murder and displacement of millions of people. The denizens of Parisian banlieues and Asian and African shantytowns, the ill-adjusted graduates of technical institutes, as well as the rote-learners of the Quran at madrassas, can now nurture an exalted grudge against the world that denies them dignity.

Globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else

In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. The sense of besiegement by foreigners with hostile values has also intensified in Europe as globalised financial markets restrict nation-states autonomy of action; globalised labour challenges dominant ideas of citizenship, national culture and tradition, and globalised terrorism provokes the curtailment of civil liberties and a draconian regime of surveillance. Economic stagnation not only stokes anti-EU sentiment; it also boosts far-right parties in Europe, some of which, such as the Front National, have repackaged their foundational antisemitism, and now feed on fears of a continent overrun by Muslims. This paranoid fantasy, novelised most recently by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, who was featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo days before the attack, has found many German believers, who in recent weeks have held massive protests in Dresden against the Islamisation of the west. Demagogues such as the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has proposed expelling millions of Muslims from Europe, have gone mainstream.

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After Paris: Its time for a new Enlightenment

The Journey Within Seeking Spiritual Reality Through the Power of Cosmic Energy and Meditation – Video

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The Journey Within Seeking Spiritual Reality Through the Power of Cosmic Energy and Meditation
Download link for the book "The Secret of Light by Walter Russell" (PDF - 163 Pages): https://archive.org/details/WalterRussellTheSecretOfLight This is a med...

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The Journey Within Seeking Spiritual Reality Through the Power of Cosmic Energy and Meditation - Video

Bill Maher is right about religion: The Orwellian ridiculousness of Jesus, and the truth about moral progress

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Most people believe that moral progress has primarily been due to the guiding light of religious teachings, the activities of spiritual leaders, and the power of faith-based initiatives. In The Moral Arc I argue that this is not the case, and that most moral progress is the result of science, reason, and secular values developed during the Enlightenment. Once moral progress in a particular area is underway, most religions eventually get on boardas in the abolition of slavery in the 19thcentury, womens rights in the 20thcentury, and gay rights in the 21stcenturybut this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time. Why?

The rules that were dreamt up and enshrined by the various religions over the millennia did not have as their goal the expansion of the moral sphere to include other sentient beings. Moses did not come down from the mountain with a detailed list of the ways in which the Israelites could make life better for the Moabites, the Edomites, the Midianites, or for any other tribe of people that happened not to be them. One justification for this constricted sphere can be found in the Old Testament injunction to Love thy neighbor, who at that time was ones immediate kin and kind, which was admittedly an evolutionary stratagem appropriate for the time. It would be suicidal to love thy neighbor as thyself when thy neighbor would like nothing better than to exterminate you, which was often the case for the Bronze Age peoples of the Old Testament. What good would have come of the Israelites loving, for example, the Midianites as themselves? The results would have been catastrophic given that the Midianites were allied with the Moabites in their desire to see the Israelites wiped off the face of the earth.

Today, of course, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that moral principles are universal and apply to everyone, but this is because they have inculcated into their moral thinking the modern Enlightenment goal of broadening and redefining the parameters of moral consideration. But by their nature the worlds religions are tribal and xenophobic, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.

The history of Mormonism is a case in point. In the 1830s the churchs founder, Joseph Smith, received a revelation from God to enact what he euphemistically called celestial marriage, more accurately described as plural marriagethe rest of the world calls it polygamyjust about the time he found a new love interest while married to another woman. Once Smith caught the Solomonic fever for multiple wives (King Solomon had 700), he couldnt stop himself or his brethren from spreading their seed, along with the practice, which in 1852 was codified into Mormon law through its sacred Doctrines and Covenants. Until 1890, that is, when the people of Utahdesirous for their territory to become a state in the unionwere told by the United States federal government that polygamy would not be tolerated.

Conveniently, God issued a new revelation to the Mormon leaders, instructing them that a plurality of wives was no longer a celestial blessing, and that instead monogamy was now the One True Way. As well, Mormon policy forbade African Americans to be priests in the church. The reason, Joseph Smith had decreed, was that they are not actually from Africa but instead are descendants of the evil Lamanites, whom God cursed by making their skin black after they lost the war against the good Nephites, both clans of which were descendants of two of the lost tribes of Israel. Naturally, since the evil Lamanites were prohibited from having sexual relations with the good Nephites, interracial marriage was also banned. This racist nonsense lasted a century and a half until it collided with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Finally, in 1978, the Church head Spencer W. Kimball announced that he had received a new revelation from God instructing him to drop the racial restrictions and adopt a more inclusive attitude.

There are three reasons for the sclerotic nature of religion: (1) The foundation of the belief in an absolute morality is the belief in an absolute religion grounded in the One True God. This inexorably leads to the conclusion that anyone who believes differently has departed from this truth and thus is unprotected by our moral obligations. (2) Unlike science, religion has no systematic process and no empirical method to employ to determine the verisimilitude of its claims and beliefs, much less right and wrong. (3) The morality of holy booksmost notably the Bibleis not the morality any of us would wish to live by, and thus it is not possible for the religious doctrines derived from holy books to be the catalyst for moral evolvement.

Many Jews and Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. Its chockfull of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

In order to make the Bible relevant, believers must pick and choose biblical passages that suit their needs; thus the game of cherry picking from the Bible generally works to the advantage of the pickers. In the Old Testament, the believer might find guidance in Deuteronomy 5:17, which says, explicitly, Thou shalt not kill; or in Exodus 22:21, a verse that delivers a straightforward and indisputable prohibition: You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

These verses seem to set a high moral bar, but the handful of positive moral commands in the Old Testament are desultory and scattered among a sea of violent stories of murder, rape, torture, slavery, and all manner of violence, including capital punishment for a variety of acts:

Blaspheming or cursing of the Lord: And he that blasphemeth the name of theLord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death. (Leviticus 24:13-16)

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Bill Maher is right about religion: The Orwellian ridiculousness of Jesus, and the truth about moral progress

Get this Free Spiritual Enlightenment, Spiritual Awakening and Healing mini-course! – Video

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Get this Free Spiritual Enlightenment, Spiritual Awakening and Healing mini-course! - Video


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