The Union of the Sacred and Secular

Sacred and secular…can they co-exist and where do they meet? As we increase our material wealth and extend ourselves with technology, do we have a tendency to lose our sense of what is sacred in the world?

Some say that sacred, or holy, practices are a product of the past that will be outgrown in modern society, and see sacred associated with religion, whose role in the world is currently changing.

Secular is usually associated with bureaucratization, rationalization, urbanization, industrialization, and seen in terms of historical revolutions.

Most of us live with a tension between the two, as sort of being “in the world, but not of the world.” Is it possible to live in integration of the two, with no separation between the sacred and the secular?

American Sociologist C. Wright Mills summarized this process: “Once the world was filled with the sacred – in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.”

In the bible, Paul writes, “To the pure, all things are pure” (Titus 1:15) Finding the sacred in the secular might just be the way to go. But it is not easy to do as we watch the evening news.

What do YOU think?

Artwork Playing With Possibilities by Ron Isom

The Finite Mask That Covers the Infinite

Joseph Campbell is probably our best known contemporary expert on the subject of masks, and his work including his massive studies, Masks of God and Masks of Eternity, offer his keen insight into our own abilities to don a mask and uncover the masks we find.

What is it about us that put on our masks? What about us creates the need for one? When do we confuse our mask with who we really are? When are masks useful and when do they become obstacles for us?

I’m not talking about the functional, physical mask such as theatrical, surgical, protect and disguise mask etc. I am talking about the mask of persona, the way we pretend to be one way and are really another. Politesse is a good example and can often be a cultural custom. When our words and mannerisms are polite, but our actions and innuendos aggressive, we are wearing a mask. When we profess undying love as a means to an end, and walk away in the morning light, we are wearing a mask. Sometimes, we lose sight of our own masks and are confused about who we really are. Why?

What do YOU think?

Artwork by Susan Seddon Boulet Many thanks.

The Meaning of Love

What is love? What does it mean in our lives? We all seem to come to our own understanding of love as we mature into adulthood, and that understanding changes and evolves as we do, so what does it mean to you right now?

The Greeks broke love down for us into categories: Eros, or sexual love; Philios, or love of friends, love in return for love; Agape, or unconditional love, the love of God for humanity.

Then there is the idea that love is intertwined with death. Andre Breton, in The Lost Steps tells us, “Pardon me for thinking that, unlike ivy, I die when I become attached.” And Albert Camus: “Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.”

What do YOU think?

Morality as Harmonic Chord

"Love thy neighbor as thyself" or the golden rule, can be found with
slight variations throughout philosophy and religion, here are a few:

Judaism: “…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”, Leviticus 19:18

Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” Number 13 of Imam “Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths.”

Native American Spirituality: “All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.” Black Elk

Shinto: “The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form”

Confucianism: “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you” Analects 15:23

Why is this important? Why is morality essential to the fabric of our lives? It prescribes consistency and allows our actions to be in harmony with our desires. It provides an internal compass that we can use to navigate society. How we apply the golden rule, or how we are able to treat others the way we ourselves would like to be treated, tests our moral coherence.

What do YOU think?

Our Own Wonderful Infinite Nature

“Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me,” Shakespeare instructs us. But do we? Is there a part of us that is infinite, or is immortality just a longing? There are at least parts of our beings that are infinite, according to Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.”

Our infinite nature is not just fodder for the poets. Einstein came to the conclusion that “the infinite nature of man includes the universe.” Kierkegaard explained our existence in this way: “Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.”

What do YOU think?

The Keyless Entry of Self Image

Self-image is the personal view we have of ourselves. It is our mental image or self portrait. Self-image is an internal dictionary that describes the characteristics of the self, including concepts like intelligence, beauty, kindness, selfishness or insensitivity. These characteristics form a collective representation of our assets and liabilities as we see them. Relationships reinforce what we think and feel about ourselves. Self-image is important because how we think about ourselves directly affects how we feel about ourselves and how we respond to life.

How we think and feel about ourselves influences the way we react or respond to life stressors. A hopeless self-image can lead to suicide. Self-image possessing body strength and health can lead to wellness. A loving self-image can lead to a life full of loving relationships. An angry self-image can lead to a life of isolation. A fearful self-image can lead to a life of suffering. In these ways, self-image can determine the quality of our relationships with others.

How we imagine ourselves to be can be different from how we witness ourselves to be, but ultimately the two will become the same if our desire to be as we imagine is unwavering. Depending on the beliefs we gather throughout our life, our self-image can bring us success and happiness, or, on the other hand, failure and misery. But this image can change, if we start questioning our beliefs about our selves and our lives. When our belief system falls apart, we are ready to receive a greater truth, and resurrect belief, born anew with possibility.

What do YOU think?

Unlimited Golden Shadow

In order to understand repetitive patterns in relationships, Dr. Carl Jung suggested what we understand the psychological rule: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

This acting out involves projecting our shadow aspects, or our belief in our own limitations. The more we know about ourselves, the more choices we have, and our limitations fall away. We can then choose not to behave in a certain way. When we don’t know about something, then it will take on a compulsive, autonomous element to it. Projection is an unconscious psychological mechanism. We all project onto other people parts of ourselves that we disown, that we deny. We will usually not identify with the projected quality or characteristic at all. It’s them. It’s not us. Until we accept our own shadow.

One of Carl Jung's real contributions, was to point out that our shadow, or the rejected aspects of ourselves or undeveloped potential, contains all sorts of creative, positive content. If you were a musically gifted child, for instance, and you dreamed about playing guitar or composing a symphony but your parents felt that they wanted you to perform academically and go to law school and join the family law firm, your musical ability went into the shadow.

Rudolph Steiner's take on shadow is the Guardians of the Threshold - there are two. You cannot cross the threshold into integration until you know that you can illuminate darkness yourself. The first Guardian, contains all of our fears in aspects of good and evil. These fears prohibit our crossing the Threshold until we reconcile all good and evil within and see them interwoven into whole being. The unseen then becomes seen.

The second Guardian is a sublime, luminous beauty impossible to describe. It holds our highest potential, and our low self image and our perceived limits keep us from embracing this Guardian and crossing the Threshold. To embrace the second Guardian we must realize that invisible forces within our selves create our character and that our world of sense is a seed ground for the higher world. By embracing the second Guardian, everyone is redeemed and all are connected. We cannot cross the threshold in separation.

Once we can cross the threshold, according to Steiner, divine protection envelops us. Evil that was once part of our experience will no longer enter our experience. Because we have integrated evil and no longer hold it in separation, the greater is joined to the lesser and proceeds from us in love for all.

What do YOU think?

What Do We Do Now?

It was Will Rogers that said: If you want to be successful, know what you are doing, love what you are doing, and believe in what you are doing.

But what does it mean “to do.” Why do we so often feel compelled to do something? Merriam Webster tells us that do means to cause, to make, to bring to pass, to perform, to execute and to conduct oneself. But how do we know what to do? When is it better to do nothing?

The concept of self-efficacy is the focal point of Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory. Self-efficacy plays the central role in the cognitive regulation of motivation, because people regulate the level and the distribution of effort they will expend in accordance with the effects they are expecting.

So there is a necessary confidence in doing because doing is expressed in the perception of the principal aim of life as accomplishing things mainly for the good of both the individual and society. When is it right to do nothing, to just let it be? Being is mainly directed at the individual’s cultivation and development of his personality (Erich Fromm). Perhaps the answer is not to choose, but to recognize being in the midst of doing. This requires the understanding that Doing and Being are a profound pair of complementary qualities in human existence.

The Christian mystic Neville Goddard believed that the only thing to do is imagine: “If you imagine a state, remain faithful to it, and it externalizes itself, you have found the creator of the world for by him all things are made and without imagination is not anything made that is made. When you discover how to make something, you have found him of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, your own wonderful human imagination, the Everlasting Sustainer of all life. (Neville Goddard No Other God 5.10.1968) This discovery of imagination, Neville called God’s “Promise. There is nothing any person can do to earn it. It is sheer Grace and comes in its own good time.”

What do YOU think?

What Do You Know About Healing?

The new focus of energy medicine is based on the belief that our "life force" creates energy fields that are unbalanced during emotional or physical disease. Because our energy fields are part of an interconnected whole, the use of focused intention by one individual can aid in the health and well being of another. What do you know about healing? What practices do you have to maintain health and wellness?
Artwork by Susan Seddon Boulet. Many thanks.

The Dance of Truth and Fact

Is there a difference between something factual and something true? If so, what? How do you decide whether or not something is true?

Artwork by Cindy Hesse. Many thanks.

A Dark Night Brings Commitment to Life

Many of us, because of a critical illness, suicidal depression or life threatening accident, have been faced with having to recommit to life to go on living. Sometimes the road back is long and arduous. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. What brings us to this point? At what point do we decide, YES, I choose life! How do we go about putting our lives back together after reaching this point?

This process, along with a physical crisis, also includes what has been called through the ages, “the dark night of the soul,” which refers to purifying the soul of worldly attachments in preparation for illumination. As psychologist, Carl Jung reminds us, "when the soul embraces and accepts suffering, the pain reveals itself as the birth pangs of a new inner being." As Jung points out "the birth of the Self is always a defeat for the ego."

Author Gregg Braden presents the dark night of the soul as one of the Essene Seven Mirrors of Relationship, allowing us a deeper understanding of our relationship with ourselves and others, and an opportunity to explore the our relationship with the Divine. The "dark night" might clinically or secularly be described as the letting go of one's ego as it holds back the psyche, thus making room for some form of transformation, perhaps in one's way of defining oneself or one's relationship to God. This interim period can be frightening, hence the perceived "darkness."

During this dark night, which Kierkegaard labeled "despair," we, as an ego, experience our utter impotence and powerlessness. We seem to be caught in an infinite double-bind, and might be afraid that we are going crazy. At times it even feels like we have fallen into the depths of hell. Suicide seems the only way out. To quote the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, who, in the 16th century coined the term the dark night: "the soul can do so little in this state; like a prisoner in a gloomy dungeon, bound hand and foot, it cannot stir, neither can it see or feel any relief, either from above or below…"

The Egyptian Hermetic teachings tell us the first step in the process of getting through a “dark night” is letting go of our ego’s hold on life brings about a complete transformation in our psyche. The second step, immersion into pure Being, brings about the revelation that our ego is itself just a limited projection of pure existence and being. Certainly from here, we begin to put our lives back together. But we will never be the same.

What do YOU think?

I AM What I Am and That's All That I Am

"All Fords are exactly alike, but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put it all in the same mold, but I say don't let that spark be lost; it is your only real claim to importance." - Henry Ford

Albert Einstein seemed to be in agreement, when he said: "The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime. . ."

An individual being is defined by St. Thomas as "quod est in se indivisum, ab aliis vero divisum" (a being undivided in itself but separated from other beings). It implies therefore unity and separateness or distinctness. Individuality in general may be defined or described as the property or collection of properties by which the individual possesses this unity and is separated off from other beings. What is it that constitutes an individual, or individuality?

Everyone who is alive, explores and expresses their identity. What makes us individuals? Is being an individual the same as being different? When we enjoy our commonalities with others, do we lose our individuality? What do YOU think?

Artwork by Ralaf Olbinski Many thanks.

Life Within the Paradox is Non Dual

"Not effort or
the absence of effort,
neither choice nor the impossibility of choice,
neither self nor not self,
neither nothing nor something,
neither emptiness nor form,
neither unborn nor born,
the third thing..." - John Astin

The embrace of third alternative does not blot out any part of reality, or substitute it with a new shiny version - it very simply completes the picture. Nothing seems wrong anymore. When we are presented by the two opposites in a story, no longer do either of them scare or titillate us quite as much, as we naturally choose the third alternative.

The third alternative has its own flavor - it tastes like wholeness, and smells of paradox. It is a dimension of being that holds all paradox snugly in its unicity. It is not the solution to all our problems, we find out, but the inclusion of all our problems into that greater wholeness. This third alternative, according to Dr. John Astin, is non dual reality.

It is nothing you can take hold of conceptually, and it's not any particular experience (as opposed to any other experience). It is the awaring presence, the beingness, the IS-ness of this moment -- this that is undeniably present beyond all doubt, requiring no proof or belief, impossible to deny -- before and after and even during all the grasping and searching and experience-mongering. The words (presence, beingness, awareness, IS-ness) are only pointers. What they point to is nothing you can get hold of as an object. What is, is thorough-going flux, and yet it is always right here, right now. This awaring presence (or emptiness, or no-thing-ness) is pure subjectivity, your true nature. This is all there really is.

From here, there is no inside/outside, you/me, right/wrong distinction, there is only unity and perfection of all there is. Everything that comes into our experience leads us here, and from here, the beginning is the end which is the flow. Is this possible? Can we live from here?

What do YOU think?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the ...

Knock, knock. Who's there? What is humor? What is funny? Why do we want to laugh? Many researchers believe that the purpose of humor is related to making and strengthening human connections. "Laughter occurs when people are comfortable with one another, when they feel open and free. And the more laughter [there is], the more bonding [occurs] within the group," says cultural anthropologist Mahadev Apte. This feedback "loop" of bonding-laughter-more bonding, combined with the common desire not to be singled out from the group, may be another reason why laughter is often contagious.

Human beings love to laugh, and the average adult laughs 17 times a day. Humans love to laugh so much that there are actually industries built around laughter. Jokes, sitcoms and comedians are all designed to get us laughing, because laughing feels good. For us it seems so natural, but the funny thing is that humans are one of the only species that laughs. Laughter is actually a complex response that involves many of the same skills used in solving problems.

Research has shown health benefits of laughter ranging from strengthening the immune system to reducing food cravings to increasing one's threshold for pain. There's even an emerging therapeutic field known as humor therapy to help people heal more quickly, among other things. Humor also has several important stress relieving benefits.

We know laughter is powerful, because we feel good when we laugh. And we know it is contagious; when a person laughs, everyone else lightens up, too. Even when it feels as if your life has spun into chaos, you can put yourself in another state that connects you with who you are and what you desire to create. No one can take away your consciousness. When you know that, you also know you can change your circumstances. The cloud covering the sun is about to move, as you remember who you are. Laughter is a quick route to remembrance.

What do YOU think?

I Die Daily

There is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist saying: "When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. When you die, you rejoice, and the world cries".

What is death, exactly, and what does it mean to us as we are living? Throughout the world, death and the rituals that surround it are steeped in taboos. Death is celebrated, embraced and feared. Around death and the dead, cultures put in place diverse restrictions and practices associated with clothing, food and ritual.

For the Roman Catholic Church death is the "complete and final separation of the soul from the body". However the Vatican has conceded that diagnosing death is a subject for medicine, not the Church. In 1957 Pope Pius XII raised the concerns over whether doctors might be "continuing the resuscitation process, despite the fact that the soul may already have left the body."

Some Orthodox Jews, Native Americans, Muslims and fundamentalist Christians believe that as long as a heart is beating--even artificially, you are still alive. Followers of religions like Zen Buddhism, and Shintoism believe that the mind and body are integrated and have trouble accepting the brain death criteria to determine death.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State" or "Bardo Thodol", is ostensibly a book describing the experiences to be expected at the moment of death, during an intermediate phase lasting forty-nine days, and during rebirth into another bodily frame. The Bardo Thodol is a guide that is read aloud to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation in order for them to recognize the nature of their mind and attain liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Some think, however, this book is merely the esoteric framework which the Tibetan Buddhists used to cloak their mystical teachings. The language and symbolism of death rituals of Bonism, the traditional pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion, were skillfully blended with Buddhist conceptions. The esoteric meaning is that it is death and rebirth of the ego that is described, not of the body. Either way, or perhaps for both, the death/rebirth process is examined.

A graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, Brian L. Weiss M.D. is Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. He has written many books on reincarnation, and maintains that we have all lived past lives. All of us will live future ones but at some level time probably does not exist. All lives might be occurring simultaneously. He thinks that what we do in this life will influence our lives to come as we evolve toward immortality. This would make death more of a marker between lives.

What do YOU think?

Our Global Village as a Single Consciousness

The first person to popularize the concept of a global village and to consider its social effects, was Marshall McLuhan. His insights were revolutionary at the time, and fundamentally changed how everyone has thought about media, technology, and communications ever since. McLuhan chose the insightful phrase "global village" to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet -- events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time.

Marshall McLuhan believed that the media is the message: change the media, change your mind. His idea that our medias are extensions of who we are, made us wonder, how does television, internet and cell phone technology change who I am? He believed that the extension of any one sense alters the other senses and changes our world. Our many technologies change many of our senses. How does that effect our lives?

McLuhan once remarked that the one thing a fish is not aware of is water. The water determines everything the fish does yet the fish is blissfully unaware. The point is that we are the fish and technology our water.

Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society, he said: "If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?"

What do YOU think?

Let It Be

To be or not to be, that is the question. What does that mean - being? It is something most of us take for granted. We don't have to know or even question the nature of our being to be. Popeye's famous saying, "I am what I am and that's all that I am," may be the quintessential statement on being. What more is needed?

Contemporary philosophers tell us that the term "I am" has no meaning by itself; it must have an action or relation appended to it. Hegel distinguished between the being of objects and the being of people, but thought being stripped of all predicates is nothing.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) exploits the version of Husserlian intentionality by insisting that human reality (Heidegger's Dasein or human way of being) is "in the world" primarily via its practical concerns and not its epistemic relationships.

Emmanuel Levinas (1923 - 1995) in his ethical phenomenology, asks the question, why is there Being instead of simply nothing? His "first philosophy" is responsibility that unfolds into dialogical sociality and is based on our transcendence through relation with other. His "being" is the exploration of sensibility as the locus at which "inside" and "outside" merge. The exploration of the self, minus the intentional ego, through an affective complex, unfolds in a language that is best communicated through enactment. It can be likened to prophetic witness. It is as though Levinas were describing the affective investiture of a subject called to witness.

Levinas' study brings us closer to the theological view of being, like Hermetic philosophy, which relates man as microcosm to the macrocosm in a direct covenant with the Creator of life, who is defined as God. This is seemingly an abstract definition, if we take the word as it is. Its effectiveness, however, changes entirely if we see it as Creation and as force, indeed as energy in which and through which all aspects of life come into being, and man, the very crown upon Creation, is brought into being.

The Buddhist terms it Nirvana; and the period of which it is the termination is called by the Hindus, Kalpa, a word signifying Form. And they hold that the universe undergoes a succession of Kalpas, being at the end of each reabsorbed into Deity, Who then rests awhile prior to the next manifestation, reposing upon Sesha, the celestial serpent, or living circle of Eternity, the symbol of essential Being, as opposed to existence in its strict sense of manifested Being.

The Hindu Vedanta gives a spiritual interpretation of the Ultimate Reality, the meaning of creation, and the human individual. Its view of the cosmos is one of organic wholeness that includes all beings and things. Things and beings in the realm of maya are not non-existent, though they are illusory. The beings and things of the relative universe appear real because they reflect the light of the Absolute.

The Essenes believe that consciousness is being, and there is no mode of matter in which the potentiality of personality, and therein of man, does not subsist. For every molecule is a mode of the universal consciousness. Without consciousness there is no being.

What do YOU think?

More Courage With Each Breath

I have discovered, over the past year or so of blogging, that it takes me great courage to post some of my comments in these dialogues. There is something about putting yourself out there, your ideas and beliefs, that sometimes takes an act of courage. This begs the question, what is courage? Why do we need it? How do we find it?

Sean Hannah and colleagues (Hannah, Sweeney & Lester, 2007) from the United States Military Academy, writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology, provide a new model of courage. In it they set out a web of interrelated factors thought to feed into the subjective experience of courage.

Broadly, they suggest that levels of courage are influenced by character traits, particular states of mind and the values, beliefs and social forces acting on a person. Being courageous, then, is all about having options, and in order to generate those options you need to be creative.

There are those with very personal ideas of courage like Winston Churchill: "Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." Or W. Clement Stone: "Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity." Or Maya Angelou: "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."

Throughout his political career, President John F. Kennedy inspired people to follow their conscience and to work for the benefit of their communities, their country, and their world. He believed that each person can make a difference, and that everyone should try.

"In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience, the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men, each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul." - John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

What do YOU think?