Capital In The 21st Century Director: Justin Pemberton Certificate: 12a

As our heads have been turned by dealing with a global pandemic, it is worth considering one of the root causes not only as to why this awful virus has caused such chaos, but our collective failure to deal with it. The answer lies within this superb film.

Thomas Pikettys book Capital In The 21st Century was hailed as a groundbreaking piece of economic and political history, the sort of tome social democrats and socialists could hold up in their hands and say: this is why we are where we are.

But despite its detailed, accessible analysis, its major flaw is its size: clocking in at 750 pages, it was one mainly read (outside the realms of economists, historians, politicians and students) via distillation in broadsheet Sunday reviews or through soundbites used to back up arguments in broadcast debates.

So the idea of taking his hefty work and turning it into a feature-length documentary isnt just a great and informative watch it is an act of civil worth.

We start in the 18th century, and consider how wealth and power was concentrated in oligarchic land-owning hands, perpetuated by inheritance laws.

The French Revolution and the period of Enlightenment offered a slim glimmer of hope but were soon undermined by bankers and the new industrialists, who established a new order of wealth extremes.

By 1907, for example, 1 per cent in France owned 70 per cent of the wealth, and the pattern was similar in other industrialised countries.

It caused battles for raw materials via empire building and a rise of toxic nationalism as governments sought to deflect the misery of the masses they were responsible for and channel it towards the hatred of people from other places.

The film highlights how after the Wall Street Crash increasing inequality was reversed, a trend that gathered pace after 1945. The new social contract between classes saw economic booms and the whittling down of inequality, a trend that lasted until the mid-70s.

And then things started going awry and we have now returned to 18th-century levels of wealth inequality, a world where the super-rich stash their cash in tax havens and dont care they are blatantly robbing their fellow citizens. We consider how the Common Good our shared store of knowledge, created on the shoulders of generations before us has been stolen by giant tech entrepreneurs.

Piketty asks why we have allowed the 1 per cent to steal from us, highlights the nonsense of the trickle-down theory and how it has led to falling life expectancy, a lowering of living standards and the loss of opportunity. Added to this, the film illustrates how the visions of aspirational wealth caused cultural, physical and spiritual damage.

A primer for change, this is a must-watch for any young person wanting to create a better world from the mess we have created over the past 40 years.

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Review: Capital in the 21st Century - Camden New Journal newspapers website

By Tunji Olaopa

It should be clear to my readers by now, that my dimensioned exploration of Christianity in this series is a journey propelled by an intellectual search for meaning on defining issues that tend to create contention in conversations on the Christian faith and the growth of the Church of Christ. And this had entailed exploring domains of knowledge that ordinarily will be considered weird, and this contribution is one of such. And so, I find myself contending with the fact that, at its core, Christianity is a mystical religion. It indeed embodies several mystical elements that gives it an aura of curiosity and awe. It was also one of the bases for its persecution in time past. It was difficult, for instance, for many non-adherents to come to terms with the idea of the trinity, of the three-in-one God, or of the mystery of salvation. It was even more baffling to contemplate the idea of the Holy Communion and what it signifies. The Bible records, in Matthew chapter 26, and verse 26, Jesus instructed to eat the bread and drink the wine as indicators of his body and his blood. Catholics, in taking the Eucharist, believe that the bread and the wine signify the literal body and blood of Christ; the water and wine are transubstantiated when eaten into the body and blood of Jesus.

One can imagine the shock-effect of this dogma on a cultural context like the ancient Roman society. Under Emperor Diocletian and Galerius, Christians faced enormous persecution, especially during the Great Persecution of 303, when they were accused of cannibalism which the belief in the Eucharist generated. Christianitys relationship with mysticism and the mystical experience began with Catholicism. One of the sources of the mystical union with God is in the supposed transformation of the Eucharist into the body and the blood of Christ. The mystical is so easy to relate to any religion, given the dynamics of hidden rituals and the relation with the mysterious which is what makes religion essentially what it is. Scriptures, for instance, have often been seen as not having literal meanings. When the Bible says, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that secret things belong to God, it alludes to the mystical dimension of scriptures that must be ferret out for understanding.

The Gnostics, of the first century AD, emphasized gnosisor personal spiritual knowledge and experience of the Divine, over tradition and authority of the Church. This rendering of the idea of the mystical relationship with God brings Christianity very close to Greek philosophy, and especially the emergence and consolidation of Neoplatonism, and the understanding of the beauty of the human contemplation of the Logos or the Word. This is the foundation of the Gospel according to John: In the beginning was the Word. From Clement of Alexandria and his mystical theology, it was a short distance to the development of monasticism and asceticism, the experience in the desert that is supposed to mark a great turning point in the souls union with God through the defeat of the selfs demons. While the pre-13th century Christian mysticism denoted Christ as the medium in the union between God and the soul, the 13th century mystical writings, especially of Meister Eckhart, obviated the need for such a mediumGod and the soul becomes indistinguishably one in union. This mysticism declared irrelevant the significance of religious life and practices, and rather advocated a radical aloofness that is a precursor to achieving the presence of God.

It is easy to see how Eckharts mysticism would serve as heretical to the teaching of the church about the connection between the sacraments the church offers, and salvation. Meister Eckhart was therefore condemned by the Pope in 1329. And the 14th century was the beginning of the Churchs acute reaction, through the Council of Vienne, against mysticism. But by the twentieth century, Christianitys connection with the mystical has gone beyond the theological to the historical, with regard to several mystical societies that were, rightly or wrongly, regarded as having some intimate relationship with Christianity. Almost everyone is familiar with the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity (ROF) in Nigeria, and the Rosicrucian Order in the West. Both are in some sense connected or seek to be connected with Christianity as a defining brand. Indeed, both emerged from some understanding of what Christianity is and how it could be reformed or integrated with some theological or cultural beliefs. The Ogboni was a renowned traditional secret society in the traditional Yoruba society, and yet the ROF chose that framework as the core of its rehabilitation of African Christianity.

The case of Rosicrucianism is even more instructive. It emerged, in the 17th century, around the figure of a mystic philosopher and doctor, Christian Rosenkreuz (where the Order derived its name, Rosy-cross), and his knowledge of an esoteric order and knowledge, derived from Christian mysticism and even the Judaic Kabbalah. The Rosicrucians believed that the mysteries are what Jesus referred to in Matthew chapter 13 and verse 11 (it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven). Similar to the vision, in Revelation, about the twenty-four elders kneeling before the throne of God, one of the iterations of the vision behind Rosicrucianism is that of twelve enlightened and exalted beings that surround a thirteenth who is Rosenkreuz. The mission of these beings, as well as all those who would accept the Order and its message, is to reform the entire mankind through the unveiling of the inner spiritual capacities which will allow humans to live in altruism.

However, the consciousness of these mystical societies was awakened most shockingly by Dan Brown, and his popular fictions, from the Da Vinci Code to Angels and Demons. From these popular novels, the world seemed to wake up to the reality of other frightening effusion of Christianity like the Illuminati, the Opus Dei, the Freemasons, and the Knights Templar. All these societies are often represented as being the secret custodians of gnostic knowledge about Christianity or certain hidden mysteries in the word of God. And around them have sprung up all manners of conspiracy theories around, for instance, the Holy Grail, the shroud that wrapped Jesus after his death, or a bit of the cross). Their relationship with Christianity is however caught in the conflicting dynamics of history and speculation that is very difficult to unravel.

One fundamental fact about these societies and orders is that they were generated by presumed or real connectedness with Christianity as grand and compelling growing brand. Most of them emerged by reason of historical circumstances or theological dynamics. The Knight Templars, for instance, came into existence mainly as a result of the Crusades which popes and kings in Europe convoke between the 11th and the 13th centuries. The objective of the Crusades was to dislodge Islam from the Holy Land. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Templars reputation as a monastic order and a military wing was at an end. While Pope Clement revoked its recognition by the Catholic Church in 1312, it was brutally suppressed by King Philip IV of France. Part of King Philips excuse in suppressing the Templars has to do with their secret initiation ceremony, and the distrust it bred. And this led to further conspiracy as to its ancient ties with the establishment of Freemasonry. The same can be said about the Opus Dei. Founded by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a Catholic priest, Opus Dei came into existence after the priest claimed to have seen a vision of opus dei (or Work of God). It grew substantially after it received papal commendation in 1947 and 1950. However, despite the growth and strength of the Order, its papal approval and the canonization of Escriva, Opus Dei has not been able to escape the speculation about its mystical antecedents, and the danger it poses to the Church. Again, its secret recruitment dynamics fueled the rumor about its cult status.

Perhaps the most famous of all the global mystical societies is the Illuminati. Unlike the other societies, the Illuminati is the one famous group without a fundamental connection to the Church but to Christianity. However, like others, from the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity to the Opus Dei, the organizational dynamics of the Illuminati is equally shrouded in secrecy. Essentially, like the others too, the original Illuminati recruited Christians and specifically excluded Jews and pagans. Founded in May, 1776 in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt (hence the societys original name of the Bavarian Illuminati), the Illuminatis original objective, paradoxically, was meant to serve the purpose of pushing the boundaries of the Enlightenment ideals, and standing against superstitions, injustices, clerical excesses. Weishaupt was a professor at a university run by Jesuits who waged war against non-clerical members of staff. This was one of his motivations for forming the group. The key to understanding the organizational framework of the Iluminati lies in the fact that Weishaupt modeled his own society on the ranking and grading systems employed by the Freemasons, considered to be the largest secret society in the world. Both are significantly anticlerical, and even though both have been persecuted by the Church, they both draw on Christians and Christian values as major parts of their frameworks.

The critical question this reflection instigates is: why was it possible for Christianity to generate so much mystical and secret societies that flourished under its umbrella or took up its values and ethos (before some were actively suppressed)? One immediate answer, as we hinted at the beginning, is that Christianity itself lends itself to mystical interpretations of its mysteries. Christianity itself is founded on a fundamental dynamic of relationship between humans and God, the ultimate mystery. And this divine relationship is further made complex by series of mysteries, dogmas and sacraments that are meant to facilitate the capacity of humans to achieve oneness with God. We can then conclude that while there is a specific essence of Christianitya set of minimum spiritual and dogmatic imperativesno one can adequately monitor the heretical and fundamentalist interpretations that they could be subjected to. The point remains that humans can go to any extent to find God.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Directing Staff, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos (tolaopa2003@gmail.com tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng)

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Finding God: Christianity and the Global Mystical Societies - THISDAY Newspapers

The Smith family is a famously tight-knit bunch. Not only do Will, Jada, Jaden, and Willow frequently collaborate on artistic ventures, theyre also just a close family, despite whatever ups and downs they may go through. Jaden (22) and Willow (19) get along particularly well for siblings. According to Willow, that was their parents doing.

When Jaden and Willow spoke to Interview Magazine, they were asked who their biggest inspirations were. Both Smith children said their parents.

Growing up, what stuck out to Willow was how many people sought her parents advice.

All I saw was my parents trying to be the best people they could be, and people coming to them for wisdom, coming to them for guidance, and them not putting themselves on a pedestal, but literally being face-to-face with these people and saying, Im no better than you, but the fact that youre coming to me to reach some sort of enlightenment or to shine a light on something, that makes me feel love and gratitude for you,' she said. They always give back what people give to them. And sometimes they keep giving and giving and giving.

According to Willow, her parents have given her the best possible gift they could ever give her.

What my parents have given to me is not anything that has to do with money or success or anything that society says people should be focusing onits something spiritual that only certain people can grasp and accept. And thats how I act and move in the world today, she said.

RELATED: Why Jaden and Willow Smith Think School Is a Waste of Time

Jaden also says his parents are definitely [his] biggest role models.

He goes on to say that he and his sister want to change the world, and they look to their parents for inspiration.

It all comes from a concept of affecting the world in a positive way and leaving it better than it was than when we came, he said. I feel like that enters into all types of different areas because there are so many different outlets that life has to offer for us. That goes into technology, into music. That goes into science, into spirituality, into education.

Its clear that Jaden and Willow are very close. The interviewer asked them if theyd always been that way.

Yeah, responded Willow. Its crazy, the sibling dynamic. I couldve spent my entire childhood like, I have to love this person. And it becomes a chore.

Willow says their parents never forced them to be close. That way, they developed their own relationship on their terms.

Our parents were never like, You have to love them. It was more like, You have your life. He has his life. And when you guys want to come together, when you guys want to commune, thats up to you,' she said. And throughout us realizing ourselves and realizing each other, we just opened our eyes and were like, Damn, you are the yin to my yang. Not a lot of siblings have that opportunity, because theyre always being pushed together so much. They need their time apart in order to realize themselves and realize who they are.

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Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith Used This Parenting Technique That Inspired Jaden and Willow To Be Unusually Close - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Make a cursory web search for the term tantra and you will be confronted with thousands of results providing tips on how to practise tantric sex, paeans to the art of tantric massage and listicles on the choicest tantric sex positions for you and your partner. You might be forgiven for thinking you had strayed into an X-rated section of the internet.

Yet tantra is a spiritual philosophy that originated in the Indian subcontinent and dates back to at least the 8th century AD. Meaning to weave in Sanskrit, tantra has since found its way into everything from Hinduism and Buddhism to western pop culture. With a focus on worshipping previously non-canonical and non-caste-based Hindu goddesses such as Kali and Chinnamasta, the tantric belief sees the world as imbued with a divine feminine energy shakti that we must access if we are to transcend our own ego and reach an enlightened liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. To access this energy, certain tantric practitioners believe in performing sexual rites, as well as confronting their own revulsions by covering themselves in funereal ash, drinking blood and wearing aprons made of human bones.

Tantras ancient legacy and openness to interpretation have seen it become a source of fascination to westerners throughout history. In the 18th century, it was seen as a fearsome black magic by British colonialists and was subsequently harnessed for its anticolonial potential by Bengali revolutionaries, while 19th-century occultists such as Pierre Bernard fused its practice of yoga with its connection to sex to create a new form of American mysticism.

In the 20th century, this reached its apex as 1960s free love movements latched on to tantras bright visual identity and radical rejection of monogamous conservatism to make it the symbol of their burgeoning hippie lifestyles. Soon, John and Alice Coltrane were referencing tantric chants in their free jazz, the Beatles were staying in an Indian ashram, the Rolling Stones had fashioned a logo from the protruding tongue of Kali, and Aldous Huxley was likening his LSD experimentations to a state of transcendence. Tantra and its misunderstood exoticisation was everywhere.

Its not all about sex and rocknroll, says Gavin Flood, professor of Hindu studies and comparative religion at Oxford University. Tantra is about gaining liberation and power through meditation. It is about flaunting purity rules and using desire to remove desire, a thorn to extract a thorn. It is not the Kama Sutra, which posits pleasure as its end. Tantra instead uses desire as one of many tools. Flood argues, in fact, that tantra goes way beyond sex when it comes to finding ways of awakening the bodys energy points, or chakras.

The west has focused on the sexual dimension of tantra and it has become commercialised and domesticated, he says. Tantra is not shocking any more, since sex outside of marriage is the norm now. So we have forgotten how tantra is equally interested in confronting horror as well as pleasure. He says tantric rites the consumption of blood and animal urine, the public display of human remains such as skull cups are a way of confronting the material realities of life in order to ultimately overcome them. Tantra is about threatening traditions to transgress the orthodox, he says, pointing out that theres nothing particularly transgressive about taking a course in tantric massage.

Tantra is the subject of a new exhibition at the British Museum in London that curator Imma Ramos hopes will challenge that stereotype and introduce visitors to the history of tantra and how it inspired masterpieces of visual culture. It was a revolutionary philosophy that placed women at the centre of worship, transcending class and caste boundaries to create a new way of experiencing the world. Even though there is a sense of tantra having been recently appropriated by the corporate wellness industry and sanitised, its rebellious spirit is ripe for reimagining when it comes to gender and politics. It still has an anti-establishment ethos.

Boasting one of the largest collections of tantric objects in the world, the show features remarkably well-preserved miniature blocks of medieval texts and vast stone sculptures of the fearsome goddesses, as well as an exploration of tantras courtly legacy in the expressive paintings depicting gods dancing on their own corpses, headless deities perched on copulating couples, and red-tongued multi-limbed figures, commissioned by the likes of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

Its about flaunting purity rules, using desire to remove desire, or a thorn to extract a thorn

The 18th-century anticolonial tantric imagery also provides a powerful juxtaposition to the fact that the majority of these pieces would have been acquired as a direct result of British rule in India. The final room on tantras 20th century legacies, meanwhile, shows how such post-independence artists as Rasool Santosh and Biren De combined abstract expressionism with a yearning for an authentic precolonial expression of Indian visual identity in tantric depictions of the body.

Housewives with Steak-Knives, painted by British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas in 1986, is a vast work that takes pride of place on the final wall of the show. It depicts Kali as a contemporary Indian woman in a feminist guise, wearing the heads of white authoritarian patriarchy in a garland around her neck and muscularly brandishing a threatening blade. It has become a symbol of tantras ability to subvert gender norms and racial stereotypes.

When that work was made, says Biswas, it was a real affront to racists. It was even spat on when it was in situ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Mainly white men who are unfamiliar with the imagery are threatened by it, whereas lots of women see the character as fierce but a friend. Kali is a complex icon, creator and destroyer. I have always been drawn to tantric goddesses for this transgressive reason. At the time of making that work in the 80s, the portrayal of South Asian women in a British context was as these meek and voiceless chattels. So to frame us as Kali was to celebrate us too.

Biswas believes her depiction of Kali as an anticolonial icon of Mother India makes it an especially apt work for such a setting. It has been my dream for the painting to be in the British Museum since, in order to engage with the painting, you have to engage with the history of British colonialism. She is truly a force to be reckoned with.

Next to the armed housewife is And All the While the Benevolent Slept, a 2008 sculpture by Bharti Kher that depicts the self-decapitated goddess Chinnamasta in the bronze-cast guise of one of Khers own friends. She holds a dainty teacup in one hand and a wooden skull in another, as bent copper wires stream from her cut neck. The work is a visceral expression of both the goddesss power and gender fluidity, confronting the British colonial legacy with the presence of the teacup, as well as taking ownership of her own life-cycle in the act of her decapitation.

I have always been drawn to tantra as an expression of the forbidden, Kher says. It explores self-sacrifice and creation, an awakening of our powerful inner energies, the potential women rarely get to express. Tantra celebrates difference as the very thing that defines us as human beings. So its important to remember that.

Seeing tantra as something sexual is like listening to a radio jingle to understand all of classical music

Given Indian prime minister Narendra Modis current fuelling of Hindu nationalism, tantras inter-religious and inclusive ethos feels more relevant than ever. Tantra has always had a countercultural, rebellious flavour that has tied it to different eras, Rammos says. The fact that it is so easily transmuted across boundaries and ideologies means that it will continue to survive and hopefully be a way of better understanding ourselves and the world we live in.

Tantra is clearly a persistent and alluring ancient philosophy. From medieval images, commissioned to bestow auspicious energy on wealthy patrons, to a goddess worship that went against the rigid caste system and masculine hierarchy of spiritual worship in Hinduism, tantra now finds itself diluted and distorted, a vision that encompasses massage, yoga, sexual practice and new age credo.

Ultimately, says Kher, understanding tantra merely as something sexual is like listening to a radio jingle to understand all of classical music. This is a philosophy that has been around for millennia. It carries with it a powerful visual legacy that goes beyond anything else in the pantheon of western or Asian imagery. It is the fabric of life.

Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution is at the British Museum, London, 24 September-24 January.

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The art of tantra: is there more to it than marathon sex and massages? - The Guardian

Meron Benvenisti died last week on Rosh Hashanah at the age of 86. He was a passionate, brilliant, and charismatic iconoclast, a bold and energetic researcher, and a prolific and powerful writer. His visceral attachment to the whole country, his knowledge of and sense of responsibility for Palestinian suffering, and his comfort with confronting conventional wisdom with inconvenient truths, gave his work a compelling urgency that sometimes obscured its lack of nuance.

He was a political organizer, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem in the 1970s, an archeologist, a scholar of the Crusaders, a land dealer, a public policy researcher, and a journalist. But he will be remembered primarily as a prophet a tormented, hyperbolic, anguished, but, in the end, undeniably accurate prophet. Prophets only need to be right about some things to be remembered for their prophecy.Meron was right about one big thing:that the future of Palestine, the future of the Land of Israel, will grow out of a one-state reality from the river to the sea a reality he identified as such earlier than almost any Jewish Israeli.

Merons life, as he described it, was a long process of disillusionment with the conventional Zionism that he absorbed as a youth. His father, who cared not a whit for the countrys Arab inhabitants, was a distinguished geographer who was obsessed with the Zionist principle of Yediat Haaretz (knowing the land). Meron took that principle to its logical extension, loving not only the land but the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting it. Their natural comfort in the landscape and their tenacious human attachment to the places of their habitation not simply to the map image of a politically designated space was his model for what it meant to be what he claimed to be: a native of the country. Intimately exposed to Palestinian suffering and the injustices imposed upon them, he came to see the Zionist project not as building the land, but the obliteration of the landscapes of my childhood.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israeli scholars and journalists covering the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank began talking about approaching the point of no return echoing the warnings of their Palestinian counterparts. The savviest observers, such as Danny Rubinstein, Yehuda Litani, and Amos Elon, contended that within a few years, or even months, the Gush Emunim settlement movement, and the right-wing parties and governments that supported it, would make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

Meron was the most articulate, most fervent, best informed, and most effective voice among them. Armed with detailed plans and information about this strategy made available to him by the Land Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency, which worked hand in glove with the settlers and Likud government ministers, Meron was able to stimulate a vivid and, for liberal doves, terrifying sense of closing opportunities for peace. It was, he told journalist Thomas Friedman in 1982, five minutes to midnight.

At first, his warnings were hailed by Israeli politicians such as Abba Eban and Lova Eliav. But as time passed, as settler leaders and government ministers praised his findings as proof of the success of their project, and as the number of settlers passed threshold after threshold, Merons former political allies turned on him. Suddenly, he was vilified for supporting the settlement of the entire Land of Israel, secretly hoping to unite the country under a Jewish government by undermining the will to resist annexation with his thesis of irreversibility.

View of the separation wall and Al-Aqsa compound in the background on February 2, 2020. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

When I was a young professor at Dartmouth College, I hosted Meron and was in contact with him irregularly over the decades. He found my approach irritating, focusing as it did on the implicit theories undergirding his idea of a point of no return, and on whether the data gathered from Gush Emunim and government planners was reliable. We were, in that sense, intellectual rivals, but I greatly respected him. While other analysts and politicians would regularly forecast the passing of a point of no return as a way to mobilize support from worried doves (only to renounce the existence of such a point after it had passed), Meron was faithful to his analysis.

Without any attractive alternative to a two-state solution available, and therefore without being able to reassure his audience that their fondest dreams would not be dashed, he was, except for one brief period during the First Intifada, consistent in his argument that there never would and never could be an independent Palestinian state. He believed that the peoples living in the land, trapped in an intercommunal conflict, would simply have to find a way to live with one another in the same country and in the same state.

I grieve Merons passing. He was not only one of the most dynamic and interesting people I have ever met, but also, even from a distance, one of my most important intellectual and political interlocutors. In the early 1970s, we were both shocked at the hubris and shortsightedness of Israeli policies toward Palestinians. We each developed interests in British rule in Ireland as a case holding warnings and opportunities for Israel and Palestine. His arguments and data gave urgency and definition to my work in the State Department in the Carter administration, on whether the Camp David Accords could be used to advance a land for peace deal or not. In a series of articles and books, I sharpened my thinking on his arguments, which always provoked and deserved rigorous evaluation.

Although I do not believe Meron was right in the late 1980s that the failure of the two-state solution was inevitable, I have come to the bitter but liberating conclusion that, in the world as it did develop, that option is no longer available. That acceptance of the one-state reality, and of the fact that the future will be determined by its dynamics, not by negotiations, required a long and wrenching process of disillusionment and learning. In that way as well as in others, I feel that, with age, I have come to understand Meron better. For as he emphasized in his later writings, throughout his intellectual, political, and spiritual journey from fervent Zionist to a quasi-Canaanitish democrat, he too learned via processes marked more decisively by disillusion than enlightenment.

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Saying goodbye to the Israeli one-state prophet - +972 Magazine

What is Spiritual Enlightenment?

Definition: Spiritual enlightenment is about aligning to the energy of your source. Its not about finding a pre-described process, but rather about following your inspiration and allowing your connection to the source and thus allowing the manifestation of your desires.

Spiritual Enlightenment From Ego to Spirit

Spiritual enlightenment is a very personal and complex experience, and a precise spiritual enlightenment definition can therefore be difficult to come up with. However, in general it is often referred as an expansion or a shift in consciousness from the ego to the spirit. It is a state where the ego no longer exists. A definition of spiritual enlightenment could therefore be the awakening to full consciousness.

Spiritual enlightenment is a vision, not an action. It changes how one sees the world. The world is no longer viewed by the ego, but is seen through the eyes of God/Source. The spirit is filled with unconditional love, and has no feelings of fear, anger, jealousy, competition etc. As you become spiritually enlightened, you will no longer hold on to these negative emotions created by the ego.

To see the world from the eyes of God/Source (instead of seeing the world from our ego), takes some practice and only a few people will ever be fully enlightened without any trace of the egoic mind remaining. So for most people, spiritual enlightenment is an ongoing process that will surprise and delight us for the rest of our lives.

As stated, spiritual enlightenment is an ongoing process, and most people will never be fully enlightened. But what are the stages of spiritual enlightenment into full bloom enlightenment? Let us categorize the spiritual enlightenment process into three stages:

1. As you leave your ego behind in the first stage of spiritual enlightenment, you stop worrying, analyzing, criticizing, and judging yourself and others. Your mind becomes still, quiet, and calm. You are very awake and present oriented. You need a lot of light in this first stage of spiritual enlightenment.

2. The second stage of spiritual enlightenment is about feeling connected to everything and everyone around you. Your soul starts merging with universal consciousness and you experience unconditional love. You are merging with light.

3. When you experience the oneness of God and the Universe, you enter the third and final stage of spiritual enlightenment. As an enlightened soul, you and the light are now one. You are now fully enlightened.

An enlightened person is connected to the Universal force.

An enlightened spirit leave a rich and fulfilled life and is driven by inspiration and passion. Spiritually enlightened people are connected to the Universal force and have therefore easy access to all the energy they need. This is why we often can see them work tirelessly to bring peace and harmony into the world. Furthermore, spiritually enlightened people have no fear of death and see the transition to the other side as something beautiful the reuniting with God/Spirit where there is no pain and suffering, only unconditional love. Becoming enlightened is a wonderful and magical experience where you have access to the Universal force energy that creates worlds!

As you become spiritually enlightened you will notice changes around you and within you. So what are the sings and symptoms of spiritual enlightenment?

Before answering this, let us first clarify the difference between sings and symptoms. A sign is something that can be objectively observed by others, and a symptom is experienced by you. So now, let us first learn about the signs of spiritual enlightenment.

As you become spiritually enlightened, people around you will notice that you are much happier, more confident with yourself, more content with your life, more calm and at the same time more passionate than ever before! They will also notice that everything is always working out for you, and that you often seem to meet the right people at the right time. They might even ask you if you have magical powers.

Happiness & passion are sings of spiritual enlightenment.

However, it is also possible that your friends and family will find you more stressed, irritated, or anxious than ever before. How can this be signs of spiritual enlightenment? Well, if you have recently awakened spiritually and are still at the first stage of spiritual enlightenment (see the stages above), you may still follow your ego from time to time, especially if your spiritual enlightenment has come about very quickly. If you listen to your ego instead of your inner voice, this inner resistance will become more apparent than ever before. In order to get balanced, you need to let go of your ego.

You cant go back to who you were before, now that you have become spiritually enlightened! You cant think bad of yourself and others, now that you have experience unconditional love this love that links us all together without feeling bad. You feel bad because your inner being is not agreeing with you. Your inner being can only feel unconditional love, and since you are now spiritually enlightened and fully connected, you feel bad when you cut off this connection.

Also, as you change, things around you will change, such as job, career, friends, hobby etc. Other spiritual enlightenment symptoms can be the need to withdraw from family members and friends. This has to do with old karmic bonds that have now been released, and you may need some time by yourself to regain your balance. As you become spiritually enlightened, you now stand from a new vantage point, and can build new and improved relationships, based on mutual love and respect.

Sings of Spiritual Enlightenment:

Enlightenment can help unlock psychic abilities.

Common symptoms of spiritual enlightenment are feelings of stability, harmony, inner peace, joy, appreciation, inspiration, and passion. Other symptoms of spiritual enlightenment are the increased and acute awareness of your emotions and your surroundings. The five senses are heightened and the sixth sense opens up or expands. Many people will develop their psychic abilities as they become spiritually enlightened and are able to communicate with the spirit world.

However, if you are at the first stage of spiritual enlightenment (see the stages above) and the spiritual enlightenment has come about very quickly, it is possible that your are still stuck with old negative thinking patterns (created by your ego). If you dont let go of your ego, you may experience uncomfortable spiritual enlightenment symptoms such as physical pain, heart palpitations, confusion, sadness, night sweats, change in sleep pattern, intense dreams etc.. These symptoms are signs of an inner resistance that you havent yet released.

Your inner resistance from your negative thoughts (ego) will become more apparent now that you have grown spiritually and have tasted the feeling of being spiritually enlightened. Negative thoughts vibrate much slower than positive thoughts. So, if you introduce negative thoughts now that you vibrate at a higher frequency, you will feel this collision much harder than ever before. Its like driving a car and hitting a tree the collision will hit harder if you drive at a higher speed!

Spiritual enlightenment is about letting go of your ego, and if you slip back to your negative habits created by your ego, you will suffer. So what do you do? You release your inner resistance by deliberately choosing a thought that feels better, and then choose another thought that feels even better etc.. As you keep up this (thought by thought, minute by minute, day by day), you raise your vibration and change your old thinking habits. You will no longer allow your ego to control your thoughts and life. Instead, you will regain your true power from your inner being!

Other symptoms of spiritual enlightenment are feelings of loneliness, increased self-talk, a feeling of going crazy, and a loss of passion. Remember that all these uncomfortable symptoms will pass as you let go of your ego. You release your ego by quieting your mind through meditation (see below), and by deliberately choosing a better feeling thoughts.

Spiritual Enlightenment Symptoms:

Now, lets see what you can do deliberately to reach spiritual enlightenment.

Depression or near death experiences are very common catalysts for spiritual enlightenment. However, you dont have to wait for something unpleasant to happen before you become spiritually enlightened.

Also, if you are on the first stage of spiritual enlightenment (see the stages above) but are not able to completely release your ego and are therefore experiencing unpleasant spiritual enlightenment symptoms there are things that you can do. So what are the best advice on how to become enlightened, and move beyond the ego?

In order to release your ego, and thus allow spiritual enlightenment, you need to quiet your mind and focus on something that feels better. Below are tips on how to become spiritually enlightened. Choose a discipline that feels inspiring to you!

The best advice on how to become enlightened is to start meditating 10 minutes everyday! There are many different kinds of meditation that can help you becoming enlightened. Easiest for most people, especially in the beginning, is to practice walking meditation. The purpose with walking meditation is to be more easily and intensely aware (mindful) of your body as you walk. This practice can be done out in nature, or as you walk to the grocery store!

Do you want to become more enlightened? Practice mindfulness meditation every day!

Mindfulness can also be practiced in a sitting position, and is then called mindfulness meditation. The purpose here is to relax your body and observe your inner and outer world with detachment. You will become more aware of your thoughts, emotions and surroundings. Also, as you learn to detach yourself from negative thoughts created by your ego, you will allow your inner voice to take its place. This shift in consciousness from the ego to the spirit, is a first step towards spiritual enlightenment. As you practice mindfulness on a regular basis, you will reach a steady place of spiritual enlightenment.

Guided meditation is a slightly different technique for spiritual enlightenment where you follow a guided voice (recorded or live) into an altered state of consciousness.

Transcendental meditation is also very helpful for spiritual enlightenment. It is done in a sitting position while chanting/focusing on a mantra to clear the mind. As you repeat only one thing/word (that holds no resistance), you create a space where the mind is just one step away from thinking nothing, and this state of mind opens up the door to experience spiritual enlightenment. The ultimate goal with transcendental meditation is to have an out of the body experience; a full blown spiritual enlightenment experience!

Prayer for Spiritual Enlightenment

Next, let us learn how to reach spiritual enlightenment through prayer. Prayer can also be a door opener for spiritual enlightenment if its done the right way. So what is prayer? Prayer is not asking or an appeal for help, but rather a silent contemplative listening for God. Be willing to wait for God, and have a peaceful and patient mind, and listen with your heart. As you open your heart, you allow the connection with God. You now have access to higher intelligence and to the Divine force! This is a spiritual enlightenment experience where you get all the answers you need, and where you find true inner peace.

Chanting is another technique that can help you align with the Divine force for spiritual enlightenment. As you repeat words (speaking or singing) in a rhythmic manner, you reduce your minds focus to this one action which is one step away from no thought. In other words, you quiet all resistant thoughts from your ego, and allow your inner voice/spirit/Divine force to enter.

Let us now see how to achieve spiritual enlightenment with the eastern disciplines of Qigong and Yoga.

Qigong for Spiritual Enlightenment

Qigong dates back thousands of years to ancient China. Qigong is still used today due to its effectiveness in relaxing the body, mind and spirit, and in cultivating and balancing qi (life energy). This practice is wonderful for spiritual enlightenment as you learn to connect with life force/spirit/God through the precise movements of Qigong.

Yoga also dates back thousands of years and comes from Hindu tradition. Yoga is defined as the stilling of the changing states of the mind and as union with God. Yoga will help you to quiet your mind and become more present and aware. Yoga is a powerful spiritual enlightenment practice as it opens up your energy centers (chakras). These energy centers are the primary points where life energy (God) enters the body.

The ancient spiritual practices of Qigong and Yoga can teach you a lot about how to be enlightened. Try them out and see if they can assist you in becoming enlightened.

If you have problems releasing your ego, or if you are stuck at the first stage of spiritual enlightenment and want to move on, here are some things to consider.

First, intention is always important in order to manifest your desires on becoming enlightened. So, set your goal at spiritual enlightenment and have a desire to expand your awareness. Dont force your mind though, allow the spiritual enlightenment to manifest. So how do you do that? By accepting whatever life will bring to you (good/bad). Every single life experience (good/bad) will help you grow and become more spiritually enlightened. Self-awareness is a step toward spiritual enlightenment, and enlightenment is the product of personal growth.

Allow the spiritual enlightenment by accepting what is.

Reaching spiritual enlightenment is about being ready. You can go to seminars and read books on how to find spiritual enlightenment, but no matter how hard you try to listen, you will not truly hear until you are ready. Your search for spiritual growth and intention of becoming enlightened, is a very positive sign that you are spiritually awakened and aware, but dont force the spiritual enlightenment process.

Dont get caught up in our modern lifestyle, wanting quick fixes and results. Instead, let your spiritual enlightenment experiences happen naturally at your own pace. This will allow you to release your inner resistance gradually, so that you will have the time to regain your balance in your body, mind, and spirit. As you gradually go through the stages of spiritual enlightenment, you will also avoid having unpleasant symptoms of spiritual enlightenment.

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Spiritual Enlightenment - How To Become Enlightened

Im going to be completely honest with you, this post on spiritual enlightenment (also known as spiritual awakening) is going to completely mind-fuck you.

By mind-fuck I mean you are going to be thinking wooaahh where do I even go from here?WhatIm going to disclose to you will completely shock you and probably trigger a wide variety of emotions.

That is normal. If you dont feel any emotions after I tell you the most shocking revelation youll ever hear, then you arent really grasping the significance of this truth.

You need to take this truth seriously because it is the most advanced, profound, important, and challenging concept in all of personal development.

This truth is vital if you want to self-actualize because without it your entire life is basically a lie and therefore you cant truly self-actualize.

Understanding this truth is required if you want to discover true happiness and true love at the most profound level.

I am going to try to conceptually and rationally communicate to you what spiritual enlightenment/spiritual awakening is, as best as I possibly can.

But before I break it down rationally I need to say this, this truth is something that cant be communicated because communication is just conceptual in nature.

This truth and insight can only be experienced through 1st person experience/phenomena.

Here is an example of what I mean, lets say you never heard of or experienced an orange. I can explain to you in extreme detail everything that makes an orange an orange, I can explain to you its appearance and how it tastes until you are blue in the face, but this conceptual construction of the orange will never lead you to truly experiencing the orange. Do you get a sense of what I mean?

Stop confusing the map for the territory.

If you ever want to experience or attain spiritual enlightenment you are going to have to go through many 1000s of hours of hard work. It will be the hardest thing you ever do, no doubt about it.

Since spiritual enlightenment cant ever be communicated what I hope to achieve with this article is to open your mind up to what is possible and how it can utterly change your life.

I hope that I can inspire you try to experience spiritual enlightenment for yourself (through practice)andeventually get a glimpse or even a tiny taste of it so that you realize that it is the Truth with a capital T.

You dont exist! I dont mean that metaphorically, I mean you literally dont exist!

Take a second to really take in what I just stated.

Your personal existence, the you that you believe you are, is all a big fat illusion.

You as a perceiver of perceptions, does not exist.

You think of yourself as a perceiver that perceives things, such as these words on your screen, that is false. That is illusory.

What if I told you that only perceptions exist and that perceptions exist without perceivers? Well, that is indeed the truth.

I want you to deeply contemplate this question, what makes you fundamentally you? What makes you you at the most fundamental level?

I want you to go as deep as possible and really feel the question, what makes you, you?

If you are extremely honest with yourself you will come to the realization that there is no part of you that is extremely grounded and that you can solidly say it is what makes you essentially you.

Who you think you are is like a house of cards, its flimsy and you can take it apart card by card.

So what or who do you think you are?

Most of you will think about this and come to the conclusion that you are the brain. You will think Jack, I am the brainduh.

But are you? What if you fell and hit your head and a part of your personality changes? Are you really just your brain if it can be altered so easily?

How about the thoughts that arise from the brain, is that what you are fundamentally?

Ok, Ill help you out, the you that you really think you are is just a thought.

Your entire being and identity (the you that you think you are) is a concept invented by your thoughts.

You is just a construction/conception of the mind. I am not even going to say your mindbecause in actuality there is no you to claim it.

There is no ownership to be had, thoughts arise as perceptions from pure nothingness. You can use pure consciousness to observe these thoughts and realize this truth.

Actually you can discover this truth using a variety of techniques such as meditation, self observation, and self-inquiry. When you seriously observe your own thoughts you will come to this realization.

In the near future I will explain each technique in detail so that you can actually practice spirituality and attain spiritual enlightenment, if you choose to do so.

We seem to think that we are experiencing nature from our point of view, but the truth is that we are nature experiencing its self.

Our sense of identity developed as a survival mechanism and it takesof credit for everything (including your ownership). We can call this the ego, and by ego, we mean your entire self-constructed identity.

Think of it like this, there are 2 selfs, the fake/little self and the true/ultimate self.

Your fake self is you thinking you are just this human animal perceiving life and all of its perceptions. 99.9999% of the population is stuck in this illusory paradigm.

The true self is 100% pure consciousness. This is hard to put into words so bear with me. Think of consciousness as pure emptiness, this pure emptiness is where everything stems from.

Existence (pure consciousness) itself arises from nothingness.

And from nothingness I dont mean the simple nothing that we all think of. I mean PURE nothingness. Its so nothing that its impossible to comprehend, it can only be experienced.

Attempting to conceptual and rationalize pure nothingness is only mental masturbation, it cant be done.

Just a heads up, on your path to spiritual enlightenment you will come across a wide variety of different terms that are synonymous and interchangeable with nothingness.

Remember that phrase from Alan Watts you the universe experiencing itself? A more accurate phrase is you are nothing experiencing everything.

When you experience or attain spiritual enlightenment you will understand your true nature and the true nature of existence/consciousness.

You will experience many deep insights depending on how deep your enlightenment experience is.

Some people have enlightenment experiences so profound that they experience various mind blowing insights simultaneously, while others might discover these truths at a much slower rate and perhaps individually.

You can experience all of these profound and powerful truths/insights by experiencing or attaining spiritual enlightenment.

Also, I want to note that I only briefly mentioned these insights so that you are aware of them and aware of whats possible.

I am going to break down every insight individually in extreme detail in the next couple weeks, so I recommend you subscribe and stay tuned to the blog!

You can experience all of the insights that I mentioned earlier and dont you want to know the Truth with a capital T? This reason alone should be enough to inspire you to practice spirituality.

If you dont value truth and curiosity super highly there are still a laundry list of benefits that you can experience from practicing spirituality and attaining spiritual enlightenment.

How about now, feeling more inspired? I should ask you this, why would you not strive for spiritual enlightenment?

I mean what the fuck is so important or more important than experiencing all of the benefits I listed and living an extraordinary life?

What the fuck is more important than living an indescribably profound life and experiencing the ultimate TRUTH?

Yes, unless you are suffering from a severe mental condition spiritual enlightenment is possible for pretty much anyone who truly wants it and puts in the work.

Now are you going to attain spiritual enlightenment? I would confidently bet that you are not going to attain spiritual enlightenment.

Here is the thing, spiritual enlightenment is so difficult to achieve because you have to dissolve your ego (identity).

Do you understand the significance of this? You literally have to kill yourself, or rather your fake self and the you that you falsely think you are.

You are probably going to be to scared and too selfish to start practicing spirituality with the goal to kill your ego, otherwise known as ego death.

If you dont start practicing spirituality because you dont want to reach spiritual enlightenment, I dont blame you. It is so rare that I would guess the number of fully enlightened humans on planet earth is probably anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand at most.

Nevertheless, it is possible to attain if you want it strongly enough.

Spiritual enlightenment is spiritual awakening, you have to wake up from many many years of of being asleep.

Unwiring your entire framework is no easy task. Even when you think you are finally experiencing spiritual awakening, you will experience a strong ego backlash.

Your ego is like the villain in all the horror films, just when you think you killed it, it comes back stronger than ever. You will experience this many times, until one day you killed your ego for good.

To achieve permanent enlightenment it will probably take you a couple decadesif you are lucky. Probably more like 30 to 40 years, if you achieve it at all.

Dont get freaked out by how long it takes to attain spiritual enlightenment!

You dont have to attain it permanently, you can actually experience multiple temporary yet powerful enlightenment experiences that will benefit you tremendously and completely transform your life.

You can achieve a temporary enlightenment experience and temporarily experience ego death, relatively quickly. Anywhere between 3 months to 2 years, depending on how hard you work for it.

Also, there is a quick hack that can give you an enlightenment experience almost instantly. This can be achieved with powerful psychedelic substances, however I dont recommend using psychedelics unless you already have been seriously practicing spirituality and in the right state of mind to use psychedelics as a tool to speed up your progress.

I will talk about psychedelics in great dept in a future post.

I have an interesting fact for you, did you know that just about all mainstream religions were created because of a few enlightened individuals attempted to teach and spread spirituality and spiritual enlightenment to the masses?

Many of the founders and important figures of mainstream religions were simply enlightened human beings with the intention of spreading the profound truths and insights that come with spiritual enlightenment.

For example, Jesus Christ was a very enlightened person and his quotes demonstrate this, lets check some of them out.

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus was saying that worldly possessions distract us from reaching spiritual enlightenment as it only feeds the ego and strengthens it. Spiritual enlightenment leads to heaven due to no more suffering. Heaven is symbolic for a blissful life, which is attained once suffering is eradicated through spirituality.

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

Jesus is enlightened and therefore he is the son of the father (consciousness), and with this quote he is saying that you can reach his level of enlightenment, but in order to do so you must treat everyone/everything equally.

Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in this world.

Do you understand the profundity of this quote? He clearly stated that there are 2 yous. The fake self and the one your currently believe you are, a human brain in a physical reality, and the true you which is consciousness from which the world (existence) stems from.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This statement is Jesus stating that he has reached the truth therefore he became the truth, and that the only way you can reach spiritual awakening is by

The quotes above are just a small sample of insights from 1 enlightened sage. Do some research and you will find many thousands of examples from many sages throughout history.

You see, the problem is that it is so difficult to communicate the incommunicable (spiritual enlightenment), that the masses formed religions out of these teachings, wrongly spreading dogma and therefore corrupting the teachings and insights from sages/mystics of the past.

Also, note that was even harder to communicate spirituality in ancient times as society was much less nuanced.

Remember when I said the map is not the territory? What went wrong with just about every mainstream religion is that they are claiming that the map is the territory.

Words are the map and religions expect you to experience the truth that is God or Consciousness simply by accepting the map as the truth.

I saw a video on spiritual enlightenment where this guy summed it up beautifully with a statement that went like this, Atheists dont believe in the OH MY GOD, religious folks believe in the OH MY GOD, and spiritually enlightened folks actually experienced the OH MY GOD.

The same goes for everything that I am telling you here, dont take my words as truth! I am just trying to get you inspired enough to practice spirituality so that you eventually experience the OH MY GOD.

Also, another reason that spiritual enlightenment isnt mainstream is that when people become enlightened/awake they dont tend to have the motivation to teach, which tends to dissolve once the ego dissolves.

Just because spiritual enlightenment isnt taken seriously in modern society doesnt mean it wont in the future.

While civilization is still in the dark ages consciously, I believe that we as a civilization will awake in the future.

My beliefs aside, there are two ultimate fates for civilization. We either will become collectively enlightened and live a happy and prosperous existence, or we never reach enlightenment which will lead to more suffering and eventually civilization perishing from existence.

I can only hope that you take me seriously because I want you to take your personal development seriously.

You should take living an extraordinary and profound life seriously.

To reach the highest levels of life you are going to have to self-actualize and to do that you have to seek and learn lifes deepest truths and insights, which is done not through dogmatic thinking and scientific thinking. It is done through increasing your consciousness, duh consciousness is all there is!

I feel like I can really help you out if you decide to embark on this journey.

I have been actively practicing consciousness work/spirituality for the last 3 years.

There is an important point I need to make clear, I have not attained spiritual enlightenment, however I have experienced it twice, briefly.

My temporary enlightenment experiences only lasted about 10 hours combined, but those where the 10 most shockingly beautiful, blissful, and profound hours I have ever experienced. Words can never and will never explain the beauty of these mystical experiences.

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Spiritual Enlightenment - The Most Profound Truth Revealed ...

This set of verses from Romans 8:3-5 (NLT) provide us a vivid reminder of how each member of the Triune God has expressed their love for us: The law of Moses was unable to save us because the weakness of our sinful nature. So God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sins control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit. Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit.

This is what inspired me to write today. When Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior, you are given all the opportunities in the world to live a faith-filled life at your fingertips. For within each believer, the Holy Spirit longs to light the way in order for us to follow Jesus. The Holy Spirit focuses us and provides a new perspective based upon Gods point of view.

I think of my spiritual life as being like a smart phone with the flashlight feature. I know the light is there, I just need to choose to use it. I have often tried to get through dark spaces on my own until I remembered and embraced the built-in gift of the light.

In my spiritual life, I know the Holy Spirit became present when I accepted Jesus as my Living Lord and Savior. The Holy Spirit is there to reveal how to live my faith. However, that light is useless unless I allow myself to be guided by it. Much like the flashlight feature found within our phones, Gods plan for us is the provision of the Holy Spirit to aid us in living out our faith daily. It is up to us, however, to embrace the Holy Spirit and accept the enlightenment provided.

Friends, those of us who have been set free from sin through Jesus life, death upon the cross and his resurrection three days later, have a new life to cling to. Faith in Jesus was not designed to be a solitary experience. Instead, it was designed to be enlightened through the very real and awesome presence of the Holy Spirit residing in each believer.

I hope you will choose to not stumble along an unlit path, but instead, you will hold onto the Holy Spirit who desires to illuminate it.

The Rev. JJ Morgan is pastor at Bethlehem United Methodist Church in Hutchinson.

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SERMONETTE: Seek the Holy Spirit and hold on! - Crow River Media

(RNS) Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who is actively being considered as Joe Bidens running mate, has an unusual religious pedigree. Her mother is an active Buddhist, her father was Southern Baptist but she describes herself using a term rarely used by modern politicians. I think of myself as a deist, she told a group of constituents in 2012.

In some ways, this self-description seems to hark back to a distant era. The last vice president to be connected with deism was Thomas Jefferson, though he never explicitly declared he was one. During the founding era, quite a few well-educated, Enlightenment thinkers held the view that God had created the universe but did not reveal his intentions, either through the Bible or prophets. They believed in God but often eschewed organized religion.

Given deisms relative lack of dogma, its hard to know what Duckworth meant exactly, or whether it would become as controversial as it was in the 19th century. Many orthodox Christians viewed Jefferson and other deists as anti-religion and anti-Christian; Jefferson himself noted that others thought him to be an atheist, deist, or devil. In the 1800 election, one Federalist newspaper advertisement proclaimed that the campaign forced every voter to decide: Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON AND NO GOD!!!

In truth, deists were not atheists. Rather, they believed that reason was the path to spiritual knowledge and that nature itself offered the best proof of Gods existence. Notably, Jefferson used the term Natures God in the Declaration of Independence, and later wrote rhapsodically about the perfection of the universe, which proved that there must be an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.

Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense, was a deist, and at various points, both James Madison and George Washington used language that would suggest some sympathy.

Benjamin Franklin did declare himself to be a deist at one point. When he was a teenager, a Puritan elder tried to scare him away from deism, but the effort backfired. Some books against Deism fell into my hands, he later wrote. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.

But, it should be said, none of the Founders were puredeists. Classical deism imagined a watchmaker God a powerful deity who created the universe, and its rules, but then stepped away from the day-to-day management. Jefferson, Franklin and Washington all very much believed in the power of prayer and that God intervened in the affairs of people in general, and Americans in particular.

While we dont know what flavor of deist Duckworth is, we can say that in some ways, its actually a very modern formulation. At least 83% of Americans say they believe in God but only about 36% attend a house of worship weekly. Duckworth said, I dont go to any particular religious institution.

Duckworth isnt alone in her spiritual formation either. About 21% of Americans now come from mixed-faith households as she did. My mothers Buddhist and my dads Southern Baptist. You can imagine the childhood I had, she said to laughter at the town hall meeting in 2012. Growing up in such households often requires extra levels of consciousness and choice on the part of the children.

It also helps if you have a sense of humor in the face of some of the religious arguments that erupt at home. Duckworth noted that her mother, who lives with her, would always quip that she, as a believer in a faith that espouses reincarnation, would have the last laugh because she would be reborn.

Duckworths near-death experience as a helicopter pilot, losing both of her legs in Iraq, surely prompted a deep level of soul-searching too. Without hearing more from Duckworth, we dont know how that affected her, but at a minimum it must have made her more spiritually deliberate.

While we can only speculate on the nature of her personal spirituality, she has commented on her approach to religious pluralism. And it sounds, well, very much like Jefferson, who once wrote, it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Asked by an atheist how she would treat them if elected, Duckworth responded: I think thats my personal belief. Thats not anyone elses. And Im not going to infringe my belief on yours or anyone else.

Her deist forebears would be proud.

(Steven Waldman is the author of Sacred Liberty: Americas Long, Bloody and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom, winner of the Wilbur Award for best nonfiction religion book of 2019. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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Will Tammy Duckworth be the first deist veep since Thomas Jefferson? - Religion News Service

Is your spirituality toxic or authentic? Here's how to tell.

What is spiritual bypassing? You may not recognize this term, but it's been around since the 1980s.

According to John Welwood, the Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist who coined the term, spiritual bypassing means having a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."

RELATED: How To Recognize Signs Of Spiritual Awakening In Your Life & What To Do About It

A strong spiritual practice can provide you with resources and tools to stay calmer and more centered in your life, especially during times of stress.

Breathwork, meditation, prayer, walking in nature what could be the downside of that?

Having a positive outlook and maintaining hope are two keys to better health as a whole except when they are used to cover up, avoid, minimize, or deny a problem that needs to be resolved.

This then becomes something called spiritual bypassing, rather than an authentic spiritual practice.

While spiritual enlightenment is the expressed goal of the practices and ideas of the seeker, pseudo-enlightenment that covers over your anger, your secrets, and mistakes is not really enlightenment.

That is more like trying to put a Band Aid on a wound that wasn't cleaned first: The dirt is still there and can even lead to infection.

Just like the ghosts that keep reappearing to haunt fairytales, Shakespeare, and your dreams, the ghosts of your unfinished business will continue to emerge until they have been acknowledged, resolved, and perhaps even befriended.

You may know spiritual seekers or workshop junkies who frequently run to the next guru or newest practice seeking answers.

They may feel better for a short time, but frequently find that they cannot maintain the high they got following the latest retreat they attended or book they read.

During times of high anxiety or social unrest like we are currently experiencing spiritual bypassing becomes more common.

However, thisleads to a compensatory coverup, rather than resolution. Spiritual bypassingskips the hard work of really confronting your own demons, mistakes, and family legacy burdens and doing the real work of deep healing.

A patina of whitewash cannot heal the wounds of growing up in an alcoholic family, or with an abusive parent, or a long history of being bullied at school, or subject to ingrained systemic racism.

Learn to identify when you're recycling a past hurt or catastrophizing an imagined future.

Then, practice using an image such as a bubble or a containment field to remove negative thought patterns and externalize them.

In the Buddhist symbol of yin and yang, the white swirl of the yin contains the black dot of the yang, and the back swirl of the yang contains the white dot of the yin.

Pretending that something is all good doesnt make it so. There is both good and bad in the world, often in the same situation or person.

Except for moments of delicious grace, you do not stay in an enlightened state. As the Dalai Lama said, After enlightenment, the laundry.

Find a healthy balance between being connected and detached from yourself, others, and ideas.

Your dreams contain unadulterated truths that the censor of your waking mind has not yet contaminated with judgement.

This is to both record your dreams and to incubate new and healing ones. Spend a few minutes before bed writing down the healing,enlightenment, or resolution you desire, and then end with a question about how to attain it.

Write down the dream you have, then receive on the same page: Some of the answers to your questions will be embedded therein.

RELATED: 7 Reasons Why Finding Love Is Important For Spiritual Growth

Continuing to be easily triggered and strugglingwith uncomfortable emotions is often a signal of a spiritual bypass.

We have patterns in our lives we repeat until we become aware of them, continuing to fall into the same hole. Only once they have become conscious do you have choices.

The work of clearly seeing these patterns or "ghosts" involves addressing the root cause of your anger and fear.

Where did you learn to swallow your true feelings? Where did you learn never to truly trust anyone? Where did you learn that grace and forgiveness were for others, but not for you?

You can move the root sources of your pain up from their buried depths in your unconscious through good therapy, strong dreamwork, and a real commitment to get down into the mess.

All genuine relationships even ones with ourselves have and slog through the mud.

Working through the issues, whetheror not the people you struggle with are currently in your lifeor even on this Earth, frees you to be able to really use the spiritual practices without avoiding reality or denying issues.

Sitting in meditation where you name the feelings without judgment and with compassion for yourself and the others is also a path of healing.

Sylvia Bornstein, noted meditation teacher, recommends that you say to yourself, Sweetheart, youre suffering. Im so sorry.

Self-compassion is one of your hardest and most important lessons.

RELATED: What Is An Old Soul & What Age Is Your Zodiac Sign?

Let's make this a regular thing!

Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW is a body, mind, and spiritual psychotherapist, consultant, and international speaker. For more on how she can help you, look into her book, Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Souls Wisdom, or visit her website.

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What Is Spiritual Bypassing? 7 Steps To Avoiding Toxic Spirituality - YourTango

"SULA (Paperback)" Jamila Woods

Jagjaguwar

6 August 2020

"Down here in the bottom, there ain't no room for me. I don't wanna make no babies, I don't need a man to save me," begins "SULA (Paperback)", the latest single from Chicago singer, songwriter, rapper, poet, educator, and activist Jamila Woods, released on August 6 via Jagjaguwar. Those lyrics, "[a] reject[ion of] confining ideas about my identity designed to shrink my spirit," as noted by Woods in a recent press release, comprise both an affirmation of independence and an assured sense of self and self-love that once upon a time, and even by some camps today, would be considered "radical". "SULA (Paperback)" asserts that if self-love is a most radical act, then it is also a most necessary balm.

In the tradition of her latest studio album, 2019's LEGACY! LEGACY!, "SULA (Paperback)" pays tribute to one of the artist's role models, author Toni Morrison, whose 1973 novel Sula "inspired the first chapbook of poems I ever wrote," Woods notes.

A graduate of St. Ignatius College Prep and Brown University, Woods' work explores myriad intersections of Black identity, thought, and experience, reflecting her own positionality as a Black woman while simultaneously dismantling the notion that Black womanhood, or Black identity at large, be easily compartmentalized or co-opted by broader movements, by the white, capital-intensive restraints of mainstream media, or even by time. Here, Woods reckons with a literary work published nearly 50 years ago while reminding us of the relevance of Morrison's work today, and how Woods' own experiences dialogue with her creative ancestry.

In a recent press release, Woods points to Morrison's writing on Sula that "living totally by the law and surrendering totally to it without questioning anything sometimes makes it impossible to know anything about yourself". She notes, "Returning to the story several years later... it reminded me to embrace my tenderness, my sensitivities, my ways of being in my body. This song is a mantra to allow myself space to experience my gender, love, intimacy, and sexuality on my own terms." Woods' self-embrace is evidenced by her self-assured poeticism, which hears the artist tell us that she is "runnin' outta time for waiting [she's] got all this space to fill / somethin' only bodies heal", between choruses that cry out: "I'm better / I'm better / I'm better."

These distinctly personal affirmations are embellished by the gentle evocation of Justin Canavan's accompanying guitar. Still, the real power is in Woods' lyricism, and the identity politics involved in her career. Her acute self-portraiture is confident and all-encompassing, with a focus on Black femininity that never posits Black femininity as a single "thing", as the end-all-be-all to her art, or as something easily defined or packaged.

In essence, Woods' identity exists only according to herself as everyone's personhood must exist only according to themselves. Like Woods, Morrison's protagonist Sula Peace is autonomous over her identity and life choices in ways that often diverge from convention. Thus, in "SULA (Paperback)", one witnesses perhaps the clearest example of how the art and ancestors that came before oneself resonate in spiritual, corporeal, and deeply personal ways. Morrison and her novel are not static literary phenomena. They are an artist and artwork as galvanizing and alive as Woods herself.

I can't help but think that "SULA (Paperback)", then, is perhaps the most radical and essential artwork to emerge in a time of social media platforms (in light of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others) awash with fleeting lists and infographics, icons and images rife with Black films and Black texts and Black artists and Black influencers "to watch", "to read", "to follow". While noble, reducing creators and their works to checkmark boxes on laundry lists (something I have done in the past) scarcely takes the time to sit with the art, and artists, put forth. It also overlooks how creators and their work have impacted individual lives in intimate and personal ways, beyond a mere social or historical implication.

There is the dilemma, too, of for whom these specific lists are created. Racquel Gates writes brilliantly of the dilemmas of "list" activism in the New York Times op-ed "The Problem With Anti-Racist Movie Lists". Gates' essay examines the dissemination of Black films for white "enlightenment" via rudimentary bullet-points embedded in those aforementioned infographics, commonly found on Instagram stories and Twitter feeds. The op-ed reads: "The idea that a singular film, or even a collection of films, can serve as a guide to the history of Black oppression is simplistic Indeed, the very idea that Black film's greatest purpose is to be an educational primer on race in America is a notion that we need to lay to rest." Gates' focus here is on films, though her analysis can be applied to lists concerning books by Black authors that have floated around, too the works of Toni Morrison often included in them.

In "SULA (Paperback)", Woods frees Morrison's bibliography (presented as mere educational tool-meets-literary artifact in those aforementioned lists) from that confinement. In the same way, Woods frees herself from confining ideas about her own identity and artistry. We see a contemporary ode to a literary work by a Black author that does not employ said work to essentialize notions of Blackness nor to teach white communities about race.

As a tribute and a nod to Morrison's novel, distilled in Woods' own present experiences of gender expression, intimacy, and identity, "SULA (Paperback)" ultimately liberates the author's work from being "in service" to another. Morrison's novel operates as an inspiration to Woods, and its significance in Woods' own unique personal experience is channeled here through a sonic conduit that transcends relegation to hashtags, infographics, and social media lists. "SULA (Paperback)" sees Woods' work dialoguing with Morrison's, and in effect, each body of work (and each artist) inspires, fulfills, propels the other. Thus, in citing Sula as a thematic inspiration for her song, Woods steers Morrison's novel away from a passive "listed" stasis and renders it compellingly active through her music.

In the age of 120 characters or less of innovative platforms that nonetheless, by nature, whittle art and literature and communities and experiences and people into fleeting soundbites "SULA (Paperback)" prevails as an extraordinary and necessary expression of intimacy, human relationships, and self-love. It is, too, a compelling coalescence of past, present, and future art, rooted in Woods' creative and cultural ancestry, bereft of bounds.

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Jamila Woods' "SULA (Paperback)" and Creative Ancestry and Self-Love in the Age of "List" Activism - PopMatters

In the hours and days following the massacre of an unknowable number of hundreds of thousands of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers christened it "the greatest scientific achievement in history." President Harry Truman went on the air in grainy black and white to describe it as a victorious "scientific gamble": "We won," he said, simply.

Meanwhile, teams of scientists rushed into the charred remains of the cities to measure the impacts of a blast force strong enough to topple marble gravestones, flip railroad cars, and strip the concrete off a roadway bridge. At the time, 75 years ago, the global public understood very little about the damage atomic weapons could wreak; the U.S. military understood barely more.

We soon had military reports, survey data and an unprecedented surrender by Japan as evidence of the bomb's terrible power. But having never cowered in bomb shelters as fire rained from the air, having never watched a paper city burn in the night, most Americans still lack a frame of reference for the reality of atomic detonation. With help from a well-oiled public relations machine, a mythology of the bomb's scientific might stood in for firsthand experience.

In the years following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no comic book, chemistry set, or cereal box could be sold without some reference to nuclear weapons. The Boy Scouts even introduced a merit badge for atomic energy in 1963.

The volume and intensity of anti-nuclear protests rivaled pro-nuclear propaganda heroically, but within the past 40 years, almost all references to nuclear weapons have vanished from American culture. Anti-nuclear activism has become a fringe interest. Where the bomb ought to be at the fore of the American psyche, in politicians' platforms, in citizen activist networks and ecological grief, you will find instead a flimsy cardboard box labeled "Radioactive: Do Not Open."

Now, another apocalyptic threat justifiably holds activist attention: the ongoing climate crisis. The consequences of runaway industrial activity become more obvious every year, even as focus on nuclear weapons recedes. Both forms of global dying originate in the coupling of earnest science with industrial interest, and both require action at a personal, local and federal scale.

Although the United States is currently set to spend $1.7 trillion modernizing our nuclear arsenal, although our resting nuclear readiness remains almost unchanged from the height of the Cold War, with additional nuclear dangers in the cyber and artificial intelligence realms, Americans have largely swept the issue from our collective consciousness and thus from our conscience. We can bring the moral question of nuclear armaments back into the mainstream only by recognizing it as fundamentally entangled with our goals for ecological healing.

As the climate crisis threatens every aspect of life, we can observe signs in nature that our biblical forebears might interpret as evidence of disconnection from God: birds falling from the skies, chirping insects falling silent, once-teeming seas pocked with dead zones, algal blooms turning waters red and black.

Christians of European descent have slowly come to recognize ourselves in the burrowing origins of industrial extraction practices, the shift from science to scientism, the disembodied mind's supremacy over the creaturely sphere. We are just beginning to reject the exchange of eternal salvation for Earthly devastation. We no longer crave apocalypse.

Here the climate crisis and nuclear armaments intertwine: The same spiritual values and human limitations that precipitated one also put us at risk of the other. The Enlightenment-era emphasis on objectivity, paired with an American pseudo-millenarian acceptance of apocalyptic ideology, created a cultural engine for weaponizing scientific discoveries with only passing regard for moral, spiritual or ecological implications. And because the risk extends to all life, because our nuclear policy reflects expansion contracts with inhuman corporations, because we are responsible for even the unintended consequences, we must understand atomic effects as features of the capital-driven climate crisis.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, testing redoubled in intensity as the United States applied brute industrial force and bombed huge swathes of the American West, the oceans and many sites important to indigenous peoples. Since the first Trinity test in the high New Mexico desert, eight nuclear states have performed 2,053 tests, exploding some 2,476 bombs and blanketing every inch of Earth with radioactive isotopes. Decades of detonations are shrouded in scientific industrial language, away from moral scrutiny.

Today, the nuclear payload on a single Trident submarine offers a blast potential equivalent to 40 Hiroshima or Nagasaki explosions four times the total destructive force deployed in World War II. Nuclear proliferation has been reduced to an inevitable feature of progress.

Every living and future creature is negatively affected by exposure to ubiquitous mutating ionization. The degree of chaotic force exerted on genetic material by radioactivity almost mirrors the theological category of creatio continua. This teaching finds God not in a moment of finite creation, but rather in the Spirit as a principle of indwelling creativity, moving life toward survival through the ability to change, adapt and improve. Nuclear activity holds the exact opposite indwelling force an enduring ability to make all species less capable of adapting to and surviving in the future world.

There is no data available on how many generations of human beings, frogs, deer, mollusks, insects or bacteria have been or will be affected by exposure to radiation from nuclear testing and waste storage since 1945. There is little data available on how the worst physical and environmental consequences of this testing already harm indigenous nations, Black and brown communities, or non-human life exposed to the waste our current government seeks to deregulate. These are of no concern to our nuclear apparatus.

We do know that there is nowhere on Earth you can go to avoid exposure to anthropogenic radioactivity: not the top of a mountain, nor the bottom of a river nor your own bed. And we know the same communities most threatened by climate catastrophes are also plagued by birth defects and novel cancers from byproducts of testing and storage.

In 2020, with so many other encroaching crises, all these consequences are pasted over in nuclear discourse by two words: We won. Seventy-five years after that first scientific gamble, as our military expands our nuclear might, our political leaders move to relax safety standards in poor and rural areas, yet most Americans consider the nuclear age a thing of the past.

We must, as people of faith, rise to disarm and neutralize the American nuclear arsenal with the same intensity with which we fight for the continuing ability of all God's creation to survive, adapt and improve, not in the great eternity, but here, in this realm and on this Earth.

[Christina Ellsberg has a master's degree in social ethics and systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary and is currently pursuing a doctorate in religion and modernity at Yale University. Ellsberg also holds a position on the board of the Women's Ordination Conference.]

Read more here:

Creation, conscience and the bomb | Earthbeat - National Catholic Reporter

DREAMS OF WALDEN PONDThe Way of Liberal Religion

James Ishmael Ford

While the majority of my time these days is focused on the Zen project, Unitarian Universalism is a big part of who I am. One of the ways I keep in touch is through social media. In particular I belong to a large Facebook group for clergy. The other day one of the members of that august body asked the not quite rhetorical question, Why should we study UU history?

It generated a fair number of comments. One or two suggesting it wasnt actually important at all. You, know, the Henry Ford line, history is bunk. With differing and some legitimate nuancing. You know, the victors writing it and all that. Most, however, fell into the, Those who dont know history, are doomed to repeat it, camp. A few took the Those who dont know history, are doomed to repeat it, while those who do are doomed to stand by helplessly as it repeats stance. Which, frankly, while theres some truth to it, I found wandering into the weeds looking for a clever quip.

A couple of us took a rather different position. From that angle on the matter of history, and what history can mean for practitioners of liberal religion, and specifically Unitarian Universalists. I felt, As a non-creedal community, our spirituality, our theologies, are found in looking at our history. This look includes what weve enshrined in our normative stories, and also those stories weve culled, but which seem to insist on being heard. The arc of our narrative and how we engage it is what we offer, and who we are.

As for history itself, here we are today, the 9th of August. A date marked by many significant events. Among the biggest within that collection of events, this is the 75th anniversary following the destruction of Hiroshima a few days prior, of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. And with that the human species moving into the nuclear age. And with that a signal marker of our entering what many are calling the Anthropocene. It may have begun with agriculture, but, I suggest, that was a foreshadowing. In my book the Anthropocene definitely began with those two explosions in 1945. The second on this day.

But there are other things that legitimately claim our attention and imaginations. And should not to be lost. In antiquity this is the day that Julius Caesar defeated his last real rival, Pompey. In 1936 on this day Jesse Owens picked up his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics, sticking his thumb into Hitlers eye. In 1942 Mohandas Gandhi was, again, arrested. This time for his part in the passage of an All India Congress declaration of independence from Great Britain. And, it was on this day in 1974 that Richard Nixon signed his letter of resignation as president of the United States. The list goes on.

All these things are worthy for people to pause and reflect on. Most especially that terrible bombing of Nagasaki. But, for us today, I think it really important for us to notice how today is the 166th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreaus masterwork, Walden:, or, Life in the Woods. The book recounted his experiment in radical simplicity. Probably today more often celebrated than read, it is significantly more than his account of his spiritual quest. It is fair to say Walden is the singular document of our Unitarian Universalist spiritual path.

I offer how Walden is one of the most important documents in the evolution of what scholars call religious liberalism, and mostly within Unitarian, Universalist, and now Unitarian Universalist circles, we call liberal religion. So, a dash of that history thing.

Religious liberalism can fairly be said to start with the European Enlightenment and is marked by personal liberty and a privileging of reason. Liberal religious currents influence most of mainstream Protestant and Anglican Christianity, much of American and European Judaism, some aspects of Islam, some important Hindu reform movements, and, really important for me, what is sometimes called Modernist Buddhism.

And in North America at the beginning of the Nineteenth century it would birth as Unitarianism and Universalism. Which, within one generation of that founding it would also birth Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalist movement was for most of America the beginning of a unique American literary and artistic flowering. it certainly was that. But in fact, those things flowed out of a heated spiritual controversy within Unitarianism and to a lesser degree Universalism.

For Unitarians, Universalists, and what would become Unitarian Universalism against that background of an emergent faith in freedom and reason, but now in practice for a generation, seeing its weaknesses, the Transcendentalists began to explore our human faculty of intuition and, most of all, turned our attention toward the natural world, toward nature. Some of it, like all human projects, would lead to dead ends. And. Some would lead to ancient wells flowing with life giving waters.

We tend sometimes to rely exclusively on freedom. And its important. But our history tells us were also about reason. And, theres intuition. Critical, critical. And, we are repeatedly called back tto the natural world, and, our bodies. These bodies. And the body of the world.

From those explorations, who we are today followed, a mighty stream of human possibility. And, of the many figures involved in that project worthy of our attention, I personally find Henry Thoreau the most important. Okay, maybe pared with Theodore Parker. But thats for another day.

Sometime in March of 1845, his friend the poet Ellery Channing famously advised him, Go out build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you. Few have given anyone better advice. In the rarest of confluences, Thoreau saw the wisdom in his friends suggestion, and acted on it, building himself that hut.

There are some who make light of the fact during his sojourn he was never actually far from home, camped out on property owned by his sometimes mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in fact frequently had dinner at his mothers house. We cant ignore how he was by no means a perfectly realized being. Shortcomings are revealed in many of those pages. His recounting of an incident with an Irish immigrant, and his prejudice, should leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who reads it, today.

But. And. Two magical words in our human condition. We, as another complicated person Walt Whitman said, contain multitudes. We find our wisdom in addition, not subtraction. And among those things our moment in history give, are shining lights on the failures. Sorting through what our ancestors said and did, warned by the worst aspects, and measuring ourselves against the best of what they offered, we are on our way to genuine wisdom. Here we find our spirituality, here we can find the north star for lives rooted in what, if were humble in our partial understanding, what we can call the real.

Certainly, those two years, two months and two days Thoreau spent on the edge of Walden pond generated a host of possibilities for us. He was enormously productive. During that time, he wroteA Week on the Concord and Merimack Rivers(considered to be unreadable by many). More importantly, he penned the pamphlet we now know as On Civil Disobedience. Which I consider another major, major document for us as Unitarian Universalists. And he kept dairies that would be published on this day, the 9th of August, in 1854, as Walden; Or, a Life in the Woods.

Me, I consider Civil Disobedience, Walden, and an essay he wrote seven years after the publication of Walden, titled, Walking, three of the most important documents that flow out of our liberal religion. But for today, Walden.

The message of Walden is hard to boil down to a single word or phrase. Me, I believe with Walden we are given a handbook. And by we, I mean specifically those who gang up together under the umbrella of that most weird phrase, Unitarian Universalism.

However, Thoreau himself summarized the spirit of that book when he wrote:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

And, to some amazing extent, he did. There was meanness. But. That but again. That, and, again. He also found the sublime.

While I believe he described his principal spiritual practice in the essay, Walking, in Walden he describes what I believe to be a wonderful and straightforward accounting of the practice of presence, which I consider critical to any authentic spiritual path.

I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solidtude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some travellers wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine.

In Zen this would be called samadhi. My friend the brain researcher, Zen practitioner, and not incidentally, Unitarian Universalist, James Austin writes, A slippery topic, Samadhi. A word so many-sided that it poses major semantic problems. It suffers in translation, as will anyone who tries to tag it with but one meaning. Some render it as concentration, others as absorption, still others as trance, stillness, collectiveness, etc.

For me the point is that this mysterious state, rich in human possibility, rich for framing our lives within the mysteries of the natural world, the, if you will, real, is common to the human condition. It is perhaps better unpacked in the literature of Zen. But Henry Thoreau captured it in his experience, and tells us what it looks like experienced within our liberal religious tradition.

And, most importantly, invites us to find it for ourselves.

Just as true, within our liberal religion, these experiences of interiority, of the sublime silence, and the peace beyond all understanding that it can bring, we also, out of that place, that experience, find ourselves called into the world.

So, its important to note how the writer of that naturalist mystical treatise, Walden, the author of a handbook of an authentic spiritual discipline for religious liberals, Walking, was also the author of a treatise that would shape figures as significant in our worlds history as Mohandas Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr: On Civil Disobedience.

As we come to know our history, the bigger history, the one that includes the stories of the victors, and digs among the shadows for the stories of those lost and left behind, things emerge. Direction is found.

And so, here we are, on the anniversary of the publication of one of our Unitarian Universalist spiritual classics, Walden.

Which is also the anniversary of one of the most powerful and terrible and turning events of our human history, the atomic bombing of two cities in Japan. We were in a terrible war. And, me, as I listen to the stories of the victims of the bombings, and the victims of the war, as I count the great losses and the what ifs of it all, I find a certain hesitation.

Not knowing, said a wise person, is most intimate.

Part of facing into the real, is knowing we only ever see in part. We always see through that famous glass darkly.

And, that does not excuse us from the moment. Babies are to be fed. Beds are to be made. Work is to be done. Life is to be lived.

And as we must live, as we must choose, what I find is that by looking to the guidance of our ancestors, especially as religious liberals, looking to Henry Thoreau, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, wise Elizabeth, and Theodore Parker, blessed Theodore, I get pointers for how I can walk, how I can engage.

And so can you.

No one knows how the Anthropocene will play out. It doesnt look particularly promising. But. But. But we are given tools to engage, both our own hearts, and this world.

And because of that, me, I feel both anxious, and hopeful.

Anyone offering you pat answers, is lying. But anxious and hopeful. Well

Anxious, well you can see why. The real world is not all peaches and cream. Hopeful, because there are peaches and cream. And, also, we have been given important pointers for lives that are worthy.

Freedom. Reason. Intuition. Embodiment. And all of it as natural as natural can be. The call of liberal religion, the substance of Unitarian Universalism.

Within that hopeful, first, a call to see ourselves fully within this natural world. We are intertwined with everyone and everything. We dont belong somewhere else. And, second, we have tools to dig into that truth, to know it for ourselves, which becomes a compass pointing us to our true north.

To the wise heart.

And the way of the wise heart.

Our way.

Amen.

(The image is a bust of HD Thoreau by Walton Ricketson. You can get your own copy and support the Walden Woods Project into the bargain!)

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DREAMS OF WALDEN POND: The Way of Liberal Religion - Patheos

Dear Members of the Brigham Young University Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging:

My conscience compels me to compose this letter to you. As dear friends and esteemed colleagues, I write to support your work to eradicate racism and institute racial equity at BYU.

I write out of profound respect for your agency and the struggles most of you face as Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Latino people of color on this overwhelmingly white campus. I stand in solidarity with you before, during, and after my time at BYU, on and off campus.

My letter has two aims. First, I seek to amplify the voices of Black BYU students, specifically their recent declaration of grievances and letter on remembering and monuments to church, university and NAACP leaders. Second, I connect their call to three eternal principles and three institutional reforms BYU must act on now, in 2020, including an urgent step that must be taken as soon as possible, certainly before fall semester begins.

I also write because I have listened to, learned from, and lifted up the voices of over 100 Black students, among 500 students of color that I have taught on campus, in addition to hundreds more who have responded to surveys and interviews. I reported some results in the first-ever draft racial equity inventory of BYU that my interracial research team and I delivered to deans, campus administrators and to you on April 30. I also work closely with the BYU Black Alumni Society and have read the letters of over 150 concerned students and alumni of all races.

I write because integrity means I cannot and will not ignore the struggle of Black people at BYU.

How the power of Black students truth changed my mind

Prior to the courageous letters written by Dborah Alxis, Don Izekor, and other Black students, I had focused most of my citizenship efforts to two matters. One, the ongoing redesign of general education at BYU to include a new, focused diversity and inclusion requirement; and, two, a new campus center for racial equality that would (among other tasks) spur the diversification of faculty now and enrich the pipeline of future faculty. These remain my pressing concerns for 2020, and I emphasize upcoming deadlines for approving these reforms at the end of this letter.

However, after hearing the cries of Dborah, Don, and countless other Black voices, I add a third priority, a long-term process of institutional repentance but also an issue we must address, as Dr. King declared, with the fierce urgency of now.

The urgent matter is the ongoing racial trauma that Black students experience that stems from the way we visibly fail to reckon with our past and fall short of our potential as a university. Dborah and Don are two of the most insightful students Ive ever taught; I want to reiterate a key point Don recently clarified in a media interview:

[T]his isnt about Brigham Young or Abraham Smoot. Were not condemning them. The problem is the justifications for their racism today have become more detrimental than their actual racism. Thats where Im hurt. - Don Izekor

I hope this point is as crystal clear to you as it is to me. The issue is not about relitigating the past. The issue is the way racism persists and harms all Black students right now, in 2020,

Excusing past racism gives tacit permission to white students to excuse racism today.

White students internalize institutional racism and externalize interpersonal racism as a result. This is not an abstract argument or a hypothetical scenario. In February, I witnessed how three white students hijacked a panel led by Dborah and Don with racist intimidation and willfully hurtful invectives. These students were later condemned by the university and its president. Yet, after an investigation we launched together failed to uncover their identities, they were never held accountable (and they did not ever admit the hurt they caused or repent as far as we know).

More revealing, the following week, white students, even in my own class and even if out of apparently sincere ignorance, asked how what happened was racist. Grace Soelberg, another brilliant and courageous Black student of mine who has been my TA, spoke truth to some of these unaware students. Grace broke the news of this incident because she seeks to make BYU better. To paraphrase Bryan Stevenson, Black students sacrifice in more ways than we know to liberate our campus, not to punish it. Grace clarified that she was not offended individually, but deeply saddened that Black students were collectively subject to such awful racism at BYU.

As Don and I established a pattern of student responses that did not challenge racism, and far too often upheld or defended it, his insights based on his recent letters with Dborah emerge clearly. The culture, norms, and institutions produce the lack of accountability and perpetuate an atmosphere where racism evolves, persists, and resurges on an almost daily basis for Black students. When my class surveyed Black students across campus, 94% reported facing discrimination and offer detailed accounts that form an unmistakable pattern and practice.

Before I propose three action steps for BYU to take in 2020 to eradicate racism, I briefly describe how three eternal principles support the petition of Black students:

Segregation compounds a racial self-deception with spiritual consequences for all of us, of all races. In a recent Sunday School lesson, we read that Korihor preached the following falsehood: Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see (Alma 30:7).

Kohihors lie is not just the essence of spiritual doubt, it is the essence of white privilege.

White people often isolate themselves from Black peopletheir ideas, trials, and voicesand refuse to recognize the racial truth that Black people have always known, but that White people must exercise faith to understand if they dont see. At BYU, when most White students go through their entire undergraduate career with none or at most one token Black student in their classes, they suffer a permanent spiritual injury. They may retain the earthly social privilege of denying a problem they have not seen, heard, or experienced, but they have in fact surrendered moral agency due to the sin of racism.

An unexpectedly powerful reminder of a subtle racial aspect of sacred sacrifice came on my BYU Civil Rights Seminar trip to Alabama and Georgia in March 2017. Along a stretch of road south of Selma, Alabama, in Lowndes County, one of the poorest places in Alabama and America, lies a stone monument lined by an expensive rod iron fence, one that was funded and erected nearly 30 years ago by the incredible sacrifice of Black women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The monument remembers a White woman named Viola Liuzzo, who was a member of the NAACP in Detroit and journeyed south to help transport civil rights marchers, whom she joined in the march from Selma to Montgomery that spurred the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Liuzzo was murdered by white supremacists who were a product of a national culture that for decades excused the lynching of Black men, ostensibly to protect white women. As Dborah Alxis explained to my class as a TA, the tragic irony is that the self-deception of racism led white men to murder a white woman while the Black passenger, Leroy Moton, survived. Words cannot describe the emotion that overpowers me when I think of the sacred sacrifice of those Black women and their community of modest means, and the way Liuzzos martyrdom has become consecrated and more widely recognized.

I often contemplate the sacrifices of 1,000 Black students who have entered BYU as students over the past 20 years or so. What sacrifices were they forced to make? How many were driven out by racism? How few have returned as graduate students, staff or faculty? What sacrifices have they chosen to consecrate for a higher, holier purpose? (They know racial equality is a divine objective.) How much time, suffering, and trauma have they experienced to get us to this point in 2020? Is their sacrifice invisible because of racial segregation or recognized as a sacred part of institutional racial reconciliation?

Racism whether implicit or overt, whether individual or institutional is a highly destructive and complex feature of our society. Indeed, it is a sin, with consequences that detrimentally impact the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing of BYU students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Rooting out racism, healing its wounds, and building bridges of understanding is the responsibility of every member of the BYU community.

As people of faith, we should realize that we can and will draw on the power of the atonement of Jesus Christ and the gifts of knowledge, research, and best practices. I will never forget how Bryan Stevenson sang the words to the hymn, How Firm a Foundation. Every single word in unity with us. He did not condemn us; he invited us to create justice. Our shaky racial foundation can be firm if we reconcile with each other and bravely face the racial truth together.

Three lasting reforms: Restore truth, GE requirement, & Center for equality

As sociologists Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer contend, racism is like the weather. Before the awful storm at the Black & Immigrant panel on February 6, it was and always has been endless rain for Black students, punctuated by storms whose timing is unpredictable but whose frequency is unmistakable every semester there is a major racist incident. There are brief respites in the sunlight of the racial truth of the BYU FHSS Civil Rights Seminar, Black History Month Perspectives or the classrooms of some professors; yet, too few other fully funded opportunities center on the Black American and Black LDS experience on our campus.

The present day lynchings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were a trio of hurricanes for Black students at BYU. As you have taken the time to listen, to protest peacefully, and to serve on this committee, you know this is true. While others scramble to buy out of stock books on racism, Black students take stock of the racism they face and ask, like Kofi Adoo, creator of checkyourblindspot.org and a past student of mine, asks, Am I next?

While the racial climate of our society may not reverse its atmospheric currents in one year, I believe we can start to change the weather here on campus by next fall 2021. We can change only if we act on three reforms in 2020:

(1) Restore truth in how we mark the past, as we act and are not acted upon (2 Nephi 2:26).

(2) Reform the present GE coursework to include a focused inclusion course requirement.

(3) Establish a campus center for racial equality to diversify and enrich our faculty.

Reform 1. Recognize, reconcile, restore truth (1st step deadline: August 2020)

Who do we honor? Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, posed this question to the campus community at his unforgettable BYU forum address in 2018. I acknowledge Black BYU graduate, Melodie Jackson, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, who asked Stevenson about campus building names and statues that perpetuate racism. Melodie echoes the approach of Ida B. Wells before him and Stevensons Equal Justice Initiative today, by calling for a plaque added to the current Abraham O. Smoot administration building (ASB) to include a tribute to the Black people enslaved by Smoot. Upon reflection, this is an incredibly modest idea. As Stevenson argues, truth precedes reconciliation.

Because it is home to BYUs president and vice presidents offices and is named for a man with so many direct ties to the sin of racism, as slaveholder and defender of slavery, I hereby call for BYU to immediately begin the process of renaming the ASB. I am calling for this as the first step, not the last step, to restoring truth and beginning a long-term process of racial reconciliation. Healing cannot begin until we confront what harms Black students and what afflicts us all by taking this first step.

So, I say, rename the ASB to Administration and Services Building. Now. In August 2020.

This should be an easy call: The ASB was named after Smoot in 1961, well after many current BYU leaders were born. It is not ancient history. It is not the name of a university. We know from the BYU Slavery Project that multiple descendants of the Smoot family support a name change. We possess sufficient enlightenment and nuance to commemorate Smoots sacrifices to help establish the university and to commemorate the sacrifices of Black people he enslaved.

I hope you join my call and pursue one of three potential options:

Just because we have not figured out how to reckon with our complete past is no excuse to not act on the ASB name, on Smoot, who most clearly and unmistakably is linked to the sin of bondage that is chattel slavery. Racism led to self-deception and Smoots choices to keep Black people like Tom (surname erased but his personhood is undiminished) enslaved, a choice that haunts W. Paul Reeve, the award-winning historian and BYU alumnus who recently uncovered new details of Toms fate. Toms fate should haunt all of us, not just Black students, and not just scholars like Reeve, Joanna Brooks, Tonya Reiter, and Amy Tanner Thiriot. BYU should defer to the BYU Slavery Project, your committee, and Black students and alumni with matters beyond the ASB. The guiding eternal principle is the same: Does adding to history, not erasing it, but embracing its complexity, expand agency? Yes, it enables the agency of Black people by confronting and combating racism. It also enlarges the agency of White people as they overcome the self-deception of racism, an institutional problem that requires collective action.

The Mississippi Legislature recently and suddenly voted to remove the states flag and emblem to the defense of slavery after decades of calls to remove it. Tellingly, they left it to voters to decide upon a new flag that would be designed by a commission. Similarly, there is no defensible excuse to delay action. The ASB must be renamed now. By doing so, BYU can set forth a pattern and practice, and lay the foundations for a process for other building names and statues. Those may find other resolutions than the options I set forth for the ASB. Yet, the process must start now, in 2020. By small and simple things are great things brought to pass (Alma 37:6).

The road is long but we must at least take the first step towards truth, justice, and healing. We cannot waste this moment that is 2020. Were it any other year before, I would not pen this letter. Indeed, I never have, and now repent myself for not acting earlier. The time is now.

Reform 2. New diversity and inclusion GE requirement (Deadline: April 2021)

Rachel Weaver, a Black American student from the neighborhood where I was raised in Chicago and who has been part of my diverse team of TAs, also spoke truth to me last week: While it is better that BYU listen to Black students, it would be best if the call to rename buildings, reform curriculum, and recruit faculty of color was the prevailing majority view among all students. As Jesus taught, And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32).

The cause of racial trauma are not the building names. As Don Izekor argues, the racial rationalizations of the names perpetuate the causes my students know well: White supremacy, white entitlement, white normativity, white transparency, and racism against people of color. We must actively combat racism and institutionalize antiracism in our required curriculum.

My students, colleagues, and I have united in a call for a new BYU GE requirement on racial equality that all students must complete to graduate. It should be based on 15 to 20 course options across several disciplines, many of which are already well-proven and in demand beyond capacity. Such courses must expand the number of sections and focus mainly on race, racism, and antiracism in the American context; comparative courses like Introduction to Africana Studies should be included. I strongly believe there cannot be more than 20 course options given current course offerings so as not to dilute the list like the current Global & Cultural Awareness GE requirement, which consists of 290 courses.

I have estimated that 70 or more faculty stand ready right now to teach the courses that could make up this new, focused requirement and it could employ a new generation of diverse TAs that enrich the potential faculty pipeline, too. As part of a multi-year process started nearly three years ago, all of GE is being redesigned at BYU and is expected to be voted upon at all levels through the coming academic year, hopefully to be approved in its final form by April 2021. Please join the Faculty Advisory Council (contact FAC for proposal made to GE) and Office of Undergraduate Education in their calls for a new equality and inclusion GE requirement.

Reform 3. Institutional structuring, investment, and creation of center to diversify faculty (Deadline: September 2021) Proven mentoring, research funding, and student-centered initiatives already exist at the college level at BYU. As a faculty member, I am most concerned with enriching the pipeline of future faculty candidates as well as the immediate hiring, integration, and promotion of more people of color and women, especially Black people now, in the 2020-21 academic year. A campus center for equality must also prioritize the racial integration of the student body, which remains 81% White. The latest data show BYU Sociology major enrollment is 63% White, so I speak from experience when I declare the intellectual, social, and spiritual benefits of teaching a racially and socially integrated set of students united in pursuit of truth. And how I learn from them, as this letter intends to show.

This new center should also balance diversity with accountability; I invite you to read and make recommendations based on the seven essential action steps outlined by Dborah Alxis here. See also the recent excellent BYU FAC proposal for a campus center for diversity (also enclosed). Since you, members of the BYU Committee for Race, Equity, and Belonging, are the forerunners to any future permanent, full-time, fully paid, and fully funded university center for racial equality, I defer further details to your discretion, expertise, and wisdom. I do, hope, however, that there is a firm deadline to launch such a new center no later than September 2021.

I have heard the cries of Black students and been humbled to change my mind by the power of their truth. I have literally heard their cries. They have shed tears and sobbed in my office, in class, and at countless public events. I will never know the depth of their pain, but I will never stop fighting for Black students, alumni, staff, and faculty. Again, this is not about dead White men. It is about centering on Black women and men who are alive, but not well. They are super-heroes, but not super-human: they cry, bleed, suffer, and die from racism. Their cries are heard by our Heavenly Parents. Their cries inspire me to work for change, to write to you.

I implore you to not ignore their cries, to not put off their demands for future study, to not back down as advocates for justice. Change begins now and comes through your historic committee. As beloved American hero John Lewis asked, If not us, who? If not now, then when?

Jacob S. Rugh, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University.

More:

Jacob S. Rugh: An open letter to the BYU Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging - Salt Lake Tribune

Religion of Saturday, 8 August 2020

Source: Kelly Nii Lartey Mensah, Contributor

The Mystic Twins

Two top pastors in Ghana, Apostle Emmanuel Nkum and Rev Abeam Danso are challenging the spiritually dreaded Mystic Twins, to an open display of power. They made this on GHOne TV's REVELATIONS with Maame Grace.

Rev Abbeam rubbish all spiritual insights and knowledge propounded by the Mystic Twins and called them 'tricksters. '"It's not true. They don't have any powers. Then government should go to them so they can solve our financial problems in Ghana", he said.

On his part, Apostle Nkum rather threw a challenge. He dared the Twins to show any power to him if they have any. "Let's meet eye ball to eye ball, and let us show power. They don't have any power ", Apostle Emmanuel Nkum reiterated.

The McKenzie and McMaine Twins are spiritual teachers and mediums of the unseen dimensions, who have dedicated their experiences from occultic associations, rituals and journeys through the unknown to bring enlightenment and direction to humankind.

Appearing on GHOne TV's REVELATIONS show with Lady Rev. Maame Grace, they made it clear that they can access exceptional powers and abilities in their spiritual self. According to the Mystic Twins, every human is a god and has these special powers and abilities but they don't know how to ascend to these higher order to tap their divine abilities.

However, this did not go well with the two top pastors who appeared on the show.

Watch video below:

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Send your news stories to and via WhatsApp on +233 55 2699 625.

Read more from the original source:

Let's Show Power! Rev Abbeam Danso and Apostle Nkum challenge The Mystic Twins to open battle - GhanaWeb

Happy Monday! Alex of High Priestess of Brooklyn here with your Astro x Tarot Scopes weekly horoscope for August 10th August 17th. Another week in paradise! Venus moved into dreamy Cancer August 7th and Mercury went into Firey Leo on August 4th. The result? See below for guidance for your sign! Read on for whats illuminated for you this week and listen to our full forecast on Priestesses Prescribe! Keep reading for your weekly horoscope.

When Mercury AND the sun are in your sign, the keys are in the ignition my Leo friend! Use this weeks Eight of Wands energy to move the momentum forward in your love life or home projects.

This is a week of observation as things swirl in anticipation around you, Virgo. The Four of Cups asks us to weigh the options being presented to us and make a decision once we feel ready and not a second before. This should be no problem for your logical sign!

You may have an awesome offer presented to you this week, Libra. Whether its a job or a project, make sure you double-check the terms being presented to you. Its totally fine to take your time evaluating the long term benefits and negotiate!

Its not easy being the Queen (of Cups)! Venus in Cancer may have you taking a little more burden of empathy in your relationships this week, leaving you feeling burnt out and a little crabby. Reminder to take some me time this week, Scorpio!

You have so much power to manifest this week Sagittarius. The problem is, what do you want? You have likely experienced so much personal growth in the past few months that you may want to re-evaluate your hopes and dreams for the future.

This is a week to plant seeds for your future as well, Capricorn. But this Ace of Pentacles suggests that you ground down in order to get clear and invite in abundance. When was the last time you saged?

Not totally comfortable making a decision? Unfortunately, the Two of Swords suggests youre going to have to as you are between a rock and a hard place. If you need more help, get an objective view from a friend or a trusted intuitive.

Endings are so tough Pisces, especially for your fluid sign. No matter how hard you ignore this issue, it will keep popping up for you to deal with once and for all. No matter how painful, remember that endings are necessary for new beginnings to emerge.

You dont trust them as far as you can throw them this week, Aries. Youre questioning the flashy sales tactics and smoke in mirrors ad-campaigns on the gram. Luckily you know exactly how to deal with this energy unfollow!

Resisting the unknown is the downfall of your sign, which is exactly why you need to fight against those urges. Calculated risks can yield big rewards, Knight of Pentacles. Do one thing that scares you this week, Taurus!

Youve made some crazy financial leaps in the last few months, Gemini! But sitting atop your newfound success has you feeling fearful of losing it all this week. Do your best to embody the courage of the lion and keep your creative spirit up -you know, that thing that contributed to your success!

Venus in your sign allows you to feel the feels for your partner, Cancer. Keep in mind that you do need to be realistic about their weaknesses the same as their strengths, and love them for them! If youre single, beware of the googly eyes, aka the beer goggles of love.

As a rising Capricorn/Gemini Sun/Scorpio Moon and a lifelong student of all things mystic, Alex Caiola, aka High Priestess of Brooklyn uses Tarot and Astrology as a language to interpret energy for your weekly horoscope. She discovered her gift of Claircognizance (Psychic Knowing) in her 20s, smack-dab in the middle of her ten-year career in Talent Management. Both careers have been centered around her innate ability to understand people. Over time, she realized her gift was taking esoteric, inaccessible wisdom, and breaking it down into practical advice. She founded High Priestess of Brooklyn with the mission of helping people achieve Modern Enlightenment. She believes everyone should be able to access the benefits of mysticism, not just the spiritually elite, so she created this platform to deliver curated spiritual wellness practices in a down-to-Earth format. Alex resides in Williamsburg, Brooklyn so the name High Priestess of Brooklyn was intuitive.

Consistent Tarot Practice has incredible potential to bring about self-awareness, empathy, and trust in your universal purpose. Alex is here to give that to you. But in order for Spiritual guidance to stick, we have to bring it down to Earth. Alex believes in prescribing the best solution for the situation, which may be a Salt bath, a tough conversation with your partner, a manifestation list, or all of the above. During these unprecedented times, she can help guide you through difficulties you might be facing and help you better understand and become the best version of yourself.

More:

Your Weekly Horoscope News: August 10th - August 17th - Sporteluxe

Let me begin with a near-classic poem by one of Malayalam's Maha Kavis (great poets) Vallathol Narayana Menon, who was also part of the famous Triumvirate of modern Malayalam poetry, the other two being Kumaran Asan and Ulloor Parameswaran Iyer. The whole poem is based on an episode described in poet-saint Valmikis immortal classic Ramayana, and is called Oushadha Apaharanam (Oushadha means medicine in Sanskrit and apaharanam means theft). The reference was to Lord Hanuman's mission in search of a wonder drug to revive Lord Rams brother Lakshmana who was knocked out by Indrajit, the son of king Ravana, in the finale of the epic Ram-Ravana battle. Hanuman retrieves the rare Mruthasanjeevani (life-restoring herb) from the Himalayas by uprooting a whole mountain as he couldnt identify the single herb he was looking for. He returns to the battlefield to revive Lakshmana who had, by then, not only woken up but even killed Indrajit and his brother Athikaya, much to the grief of their father, Ravana. Unable to bear the loss of both his sons, Lankesh, the Lord of Lanka, returns to his palace to seek comfort in his wife Mandodaris arms. As it happened in classical times, when a great King returns from battle, so must his army and the whole war machine follow him.

In what could certainly be described as some of the most sublime lines in literature anywhere at any time, Sage Valmiki excels himself here while enunciating on the ephemerality of human life and the transient nature of mans relationship with his material world that includes his near and dear.

As the king moves away from the battlefield and towards his palace, he was followed by the whole humanity of his soldiers and the, as also the battle animals and weapons. As he goes further down the road, the massive fallback can be seen thinning bit by retinue bit, square by square and, finally, by the time he reaches the palace, the retreating procession is reduced to a few top generals and the royal bodyguards. Moving further to the interiors, Ravana had only his close relatives to accompany him into the inner chambers of the royal household. Thus, finally, he approaches the royal bedroom where he was expecting his wife to be waiting for him and in whose arms the mighty king was eager to fall asleep. Ravana opens the door only to find that even she is missing. Mandodari had killed herself upon her sons death. The moment of ultimate wisdom dawns on the great king who is also a great scholar and a favourite devotee of Lord Shiva. At that rare moment of realisation, Ravana could see life as a gradual journey towards the Supreme Being, the Brahma, in the course of which everyone, even the king, had to renounce all of his self both material and spiritual, his power and glory, his vices and virtues, and even his pride and self-respect until he is left with the only indestructible, the only permanent entity, the soul that which itself must merge in the very end with Brahma, the Universe.

This is the profundity of a Faith called Hinduism (in English) or Hindutva, as it is known in these times of divisive politics, or just Hindu which is what it ultimately is. A phenomenon that refuses to be encased in a few hymns and prayers, or tied around a few thousand gods and goddesses, or patronized by believers and vilified by non-believers alike, or interpreted by self-styled scholars and pundits, or swallowed lock, stock, and barrel by the un-critical and superstitious. And yet, this great source of universal wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, this superior literature, in fact, the best any civilization could ever offer to humanity, remains an enigma, a hypothesis that anyone and everyone is allowed to enter its ancient catacombs and explore according to his own vision or vicissitudes, his own caprice or confidence. Very much like our own blue planet that has endured nearly five billion years of galactic poundings, and yet remains the best in our known universe, so too has this unique belief system survived thousands of years of civilizational raids and invasions with its inner core, its teachings, its literature, and even its fables all staying intact. Not by resorting to violence and bloodshed, but by being inclusive and accommodative, all the while being supremely confident of its eternity through time and space.

True, Hinduism has been misrepresented and mystified by foreign scholars such as Friedrich Max Muller who wanted to super-impose Christianity over the ancient religion; it has been slandered and vilified by several secular scholars who misinterpreted and mistranslated the Vedas and Upanishads; it has been desecrated and nearly destroyed by foreign invaders. And yet, very much like the Earth itself, this belief system, Sanatana Dharma as some call it, has prevailed, and still does, like everything else that is rooted on the terra firma of this planet - the mountains, the oceans, the forests and the deserts. Not for nothing did Carl Sagan call its permanence elemental.

Of course, for the untrained mind and the un-evolved soul, this phenomenon is beyond their grasp, nothing more than mere illusion or Maya.

To an atheist like me, personally, the great epics of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata, as also the great Vedas and the Upanishads, are all a divine celebration of this Dharma called Hinduism. The heroes, the heroines, the demons, and the characters from the animal world therein are all born out of the super-natural imagination of Man who wanted to create a world of perfection where truth eventually would prevail over falsehood, the good over the evil. Its only logical then that these human and non-human characters earned, over the millennia, their divinity worthy of worship.

(The author is a veteran journalist with over 40 years of experience. He has worked with The Hindustan Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, and Al Jazeera, and News X.)

Read more:

Hinduism Survived Years Of Raids Through Its Inclusiveness, Not Violence And Bloodshed - Outlook India

Please join Dave the Mystic on Monday, August 3, 2020 at 8PM MDT with guest Michael McAdams.

Michael McAdams has felt a sense of destiny and purpose his entire life. A life-long sincere seeker of truth, Michael has endeavored to reach out with an open mind to all sources available.

His mother, Wilma Jean Jones, was a devout Christian and a daily reader of her Bible. Jones was spoken to and advised throughout her life regarding spiritual matters. In 1977, she was led to sit down and receive messages and teachings dictated directly from spirit teachers/angels in dedicated sessionsand did so for the next 22 years. Working with her son Michael McAdams, this collection of messages and teachings are recorded in three volumes of the book An Angel Told Me So.

Brought up in the Pentecostal church, Michaels uncle was a fiery Pentecostal preacher by the name of John W. Sullivan. Although Michael has always felt more spiritual than religious, communication from the highest possible source has been his goal as he enables his mind to receive information and direction that allows him to help the greatest number of people. When the student

is ready a teacher will appear has been very appropriate for Michael as his path has consistently brought him together with individuals, books, and sources of learning that have allowed continued growth and spiritual enlightenment.

Thanks for listening!

Blessings

Dave the Mystic

Go here to read the rest:

#482 Author and Intuitive Michael McAdams and His Book, An Angel Told Me So - BlogTalkRadio

Mid-length propaganda

Heres the thing: youre riding the wrong surfboard.

The wrong surfboard, that is, if you have no surf contest trophies in your well-stocked boardroom, no sponsorship deals, less than six stickers top and bottom and only family and friends subscribing to your vlog.

Forget what all the promo clips on various websites try to get you to believe, because you perform like none of the super-hot surfers featured in those test rides, with their tail slides, vertical backside hacks and aerial antics.

As recently as last month a New York Times feature covering our sports Covid-truncated entry into the Olympics, asserted that surfings three fundamentals were airs, turns and barrels.

Yeah, right, and you get your boards for free, too.

Whole quivers, like little Jackson Dorian, whose grasp of those fundamentals is on display every time he hits the water, fresh or otherwise. But hes not you, so while Baby D might actually tick each of those boxes on every Waco pulse he rides, let me tell you how you surf, if youre old enough to have read this far and still insist on riding any surfboard that even remotely resembles a pros.

You thrash your way into most waves, paddling furiously, occasionally kicking.

Most of your drops are late, because you have to take off under the lip.

After getting to your feet you immediately start back-foot pushing against your fin cluster, rather than applying pressure to the inside rail, in an effort to get the board moving down the line.

You rarely do an actual bottom turn, but for the most part just push the board ahead of you across the middle of the wave face, seldom, if ever, achieving enough planing speed to apply the rhythmic weighting/unweighting that defines true rail-to-rail surfing.

After running ahead of the curl, and if youre lucky enough to find an accommodating shoulder, with the board flat on the wave face you lean, not carve, into a cutback, not engaging the rail but simply re-directing the nose of the board toward the curl or advancing whitewater.

Slowing down considerably, you then step on the tail, lift the nose, swing the board back around and begin the fin-pushing process all over again.

And thats if youre lucky.

A more typical ride sees you pushing your board flat across the wave face, trying desperately to generate and maintain speed until the wave inevitably closes out and you crank the nose of your board up above the lip and then swing it back down in the whitewater in a classic roller-coaster maneuver that Mike Purpus wouldve been proud ofin 1969.

Is all this to say that youre a bad surfer?

No, simply that youre riding the wrong surfboard.

Just like fundamentals for the vast majority of surfers today do not include airs or barrels (well give you the turns, however feeble), an equally vast majority take advantage of absolutely none of the design/performance qualities built into boards ridden by professional grade surfers.

These boards, primarily thrusters with various, subtle variations, are designed to do exactly what all thrusters have been designed to do since Simons first incarnation in 1981: go vertical and then back down, with alternating pressure on the side fins, carving turns on-rail.

Now be honest: is that how you surf?

Ever?

So heres your problem and the solution, all in two sentences.

Problem: youre riding a pro model thruster like youre on a mid-size.

Solution: Ride a mid-size.

Seriously.

Have you seen that video of Torren Martyn in Iceland?

Or Rob Machado on his Stretched Seaside?

Go ahead, scrounge up any of the latest CI-Mid clips and ask yourself this: who do you surf more like, Italo Ferreira or Devon Howard?

Of course, and why do you think thats so?

Because mid-masters like Howard, Martyn and Machado ride boards that are designed to accommodate the needs of, Id say, 99% of all of the worlds competent surfers you included.

Unlike the pro model boards, with their anorexic volume, wide-point-back, narrow-nosed templates and demanding fin-clusters each designed to be ridden in a manner you never have and most probably never will todays new mids, with their continuous curve templates, generous width and foil and sensible fin setups let you do all the things youre trying to do now, only better.

Not sticking trampoline aerials or GoPro-ing fifty-eight-second barrels, but getting into the waves that you regularly surf early and with authority. Immediately achieving trim, then flowing, not fighting, from top to bottom and back again. Generating speed with the rail, not scrubbing it off with the fins. Carrying that speed through a legitimate figure-eight, not rectangular, cutback. Catching more waves, making more waves, riding faster, cleaner, stronger.

Your own surfing experience reflecting those additional core values that in the same NYT story they assign as if solely applicable to professional competitive performance: speed, power and flow.

Forget the New York Times that could be you.

Tomorrow.

But only if youd stop riding the wrong surfboard, and get yourself a mid.

(Oh, and for those particular BeachGrit readers out there who, after reading this, are no doubt feverishly working up some predictably caustic responsesome variation of Fuck that guy, I dont need a mid-size. I have only one word: bullshit.)

Follow this link:

A rebuttal to Sam George's mid-length propaganda: "The path to enlightenment ain't easy. We get it through trial, struggle, self-flagellation....

Question: Did Krishna do any sadhana before his enlightenment? What brought him to such a state in this life?

Sadhguru: For a human being to live in joy and love, every day is a tremendous sadhana. Most people smile when someone is around, but if you look at them when they are alone, the depressed face they wear says everything. If you cannot be alone, it obviously means you are in bad company.

Mixing with people is like a festival, but being is always in aloneness. To be loving every moment of your lifenot only if a certain situation occurs, or if you see a certain personif you are simply loving, indiscriminately, your intelligence blossoms in a completely different way.

To be loving is not a gift to someone else. It is the pleasantness of your systemyour emotion, mind, and body naturally become pleasant. And there is substantial scientific evidence to prove today that only when your system is pleasant, your intelligence functions at its best.

You will see, if your heart beats 60 times per minute when you are restful, you are in tune with the planet. If you do some simple yogic practices like Surya Namaskar and Shambhavi Mahamudra for about 18 months, it will be 60you will be in tune. When you are in tune, being joyful is natural because that is how the being is made. It is made to flourish.

This was Krishnas sadhanahe was in perfect tune with life around him. The fact that everyone still loved him though he stole butter and pulled all kinds of pranks means that somehow he got them in tune with himself.

Until the age of 16, Krishnas sadhana was just to be in perfect tune with life around him. Then his Guru, Sandipani, reminded him that there was a bigger purpose to his life. Krishna said, "I just like to be in this village. I like the cows, the cowherds, the gopis. I want to dance and sing with them. But Sandipani said, You have to stand up because this is the purpose for which you were born. This needs to happen."

Krishna went and stood on a small hill that is known as Govardhan Hill. When Krishna came back down, he was not the boy he used to be. He came down with a different gravity about himself. People knew something phenomenal had happened, and they also knew they were going to lose him. When they looked at him, he still smiled back at them, but there was no love in his eyesthere was vision. He saw things that they could not even imagine.

After the reminder, his first exploit was to kill his uncle Kamsa and end his tyranny over the Yadavas. Then he withdrew into the ashram of his Guru Sandipani along with his brother Balarama and lived the life of a brahmachari for the next seven years. Until he was 22, he did intense spiritual sadhana.

Krishnas sadhana was of a different dimension. Sandipani designed it in such a way that it was largely internal. Since Krishna lived and acted like he belonged to Satya Yuga, everything happened on a mental level for him. Sandipani did not need to open his mouth to give an instruction. All was conveyed mentally; all was grasped mentally; all was attained mentally. And he displayed that in a million different ways in his life.

(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a bestselling author. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 and can be contacted atIsha.sadhguru.org)

Continue reading here:

Dimension of Krishna Sadhana - The New Indian Express