Category: Spirituality
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Karma, Fate, & God’s Will
The Hindus and Buddhists seem to believe that the universe is essentially an orderly place, and that in the human condition, the person’s initial social position, temperament, dispositions, abilities, and net positive and negative circumstances derive from past actions. So far so good, but because the universe is not only orderly, but also fair, the…
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Role of Religion
Religion conveys stories and symbols that have primal meaning of good and bad, life and death, health and illness. Religion provides a coherent ethic and set of principles by which one conducts one’s life. Religion renders transcendent significance to the self and the self’s actions because religion takes a broad view –not restricted to the…
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Adrift in a Sea of Change
We do not chose our sex, race, genetics, temperament, culture of origin, parents, birth history, and time and place of birth. We may influence our interpersonal environment after birth, but only that which is closely bounded in space and time and already constrained by culture, collective and personal history. We grow by degrees to awareness…
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Consciousness
We did not create the complexity, wonder, and mystery of the world –and even were we to impact this world of perception, we merely inflect and modify, but do not fundamentally ordain its form. And this appears true whether the world is material, as objectively existent other, or idea, as a derivative of Mind. I…
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Time’s How You Look at It
When I lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, I had a next door neighbor who preferred to remain anonymous. Lindsey claimed her husband had been murdered by a conspiracy of unscrupulous investors who aimed to restrict a patented technology her husband had developed. He had produced a device that enabled rapid aging of organic and inorganic…
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Memorial for Harmon S Ephron, MD Full Text
I have special affection for Harmon S. Ephron. I met “Sol” as he was known at a meeting of the Princeton Psychoanalytic Society. His acuity of observation, irony, and joyful humor brought life to a sometimes staid affair. He was, in other words, the life of the party. In the years following our introduction, Sol was my mentor,…
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My Adventures with Meditation
My history of meditation is humorous since I have approached meditation with the same fast-food consciousness that Americans tend to approach all aspects of their lives from diet to human relations. The first time I meditated I was sixteen years old. I had just read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and I picked-up some of the descriptions…
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Prayer for Each Day
Lord of my Being, Creator, Sustainer, Destroyer, Immeasurable Source, Profound Emptiness, Harmonizer, Sustain my life Unify with Your way. Nourish in me Awareness, Wisdom and Compassion. Bear up my resolve and make clear the path. May Your Way and my way be one now and every day. …
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Some Contrasts among Transpersonal Psychological Theories: Wilber, Washburn, Russell, and Epstein.
By Leland van den Daele In his seminal book The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley illustrates how religious experience, cross-culturally and historically, gives rise to commonalities in attitudes, values, and orientation toward the world. In the subsequent literature in the burgeoning area of transpersonal psychology, the idea that the mystic worldview embodies an organized whole with…