There is losing the church.. and there is losing faith, two different things i think. As i said earlier somewhere, i see God on the mountain top, with many paths to that summit. All are equally valid and will get you there. I loat the church for many years, but found faith apart from that. Just my thoughts..
What/Who were your spiritual influences? (Or what led you away from Spirituality)
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It's same for me. I don't have any particular spiritual influences. I absorb information about spirituality from many different sources. It can be YouTube, an interesting book or even nature. It's not any person particularly. Buddhism fascinates me a lot, it speaks to me. I wouldn't call myself a buddhist though. Spirituality can be found everywhere.
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I haven't had a chance to properly read this thread and absorb what people are saying but i caught sight quickly there of someone saying something along the lines of there being many paths to God
The work of Joseph campbell explores the idea of all the worlds religions being different expressions of the same hero journey. In each religion the hero is different but their quest is essentially the same
Joseph does not advocate that you worship the hero of the religion but rather that you yourself become the hero in your own spiritual journey
he speaks of archetypal images that appear to people on this journey which mark the passage of a person along the path. The indigenous cultures of all people around the world have these myths that contain these archetypal images so people have been aware of this ephemeral process for many thousands of years
Some people have some negative words to say about christianity and some of those people have a materialist ideology that underlies their opinions.
My own view of christianity is that at some point some people, lets call them the priest caste, decided that they could gain more power by removing people from direct religious experience and instead placing themselves as an intermediary between people and the divine
Prior to this people would have seen each other as expressions of the same divine source who are each living out their own individual experience in this reality as a ***fill in the gap***....christian, muslim, jew, atheist, man, woman, gay person, trans, whatever
Each person could then if they were so inclined seek a religious connection to their source as the divine is essentially already present within them
However I think the priest caste said to people that God is not within but is instead without and from that time onwards people started revering outer deities that were packaged for them by the priests. Because people stopped seeing the divine in themselves and everyone else they were then easily divided into competing factions and also by placing themselves as the messengers of the external god the priests then gave themselves a privileged place of power
Why christianity is perhaps failing is because it has moved away from its roots of personal spiritual connection with the divine which is what its early desert fathers and celtic ascetics were trying to do and instead is selling people absolution from their sins as well as viewpoints that come from the priests themselves rather than from any higher source
So if you are going to seek your authentic self and try and pursue your own hero journey you have to cut loose from the priest caste and start listening to an internal voice
that's pretty much what duchamp did!
he put a mens urinal on display and then claimed it was art!
Not inaccurate. Some deep thoughts have been thought here. :lol:
This 'internal voice' I guess is another reason why I've had to leave Christianity. I felt that some of the principles they were teaching were conflicting with my own internal morality.
Though I think most Christians would just say that this is "the devil," or "sin nature" trying to lead me astray.
Maybe it is. But it doesn't feel that way.
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*glances at bookshelf*
So I have a few suggestions that had a pretty significant impact on me spiritually:
1. Think on These Things by Jiddu Khrishnamurti
2. On Love and Loneliness by Jiddu Khrishnamurti
3. The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama
4. The Denial of Death by Thomas Becker (won Pulitzer prize)
5. Dao de Jing, a philosophical translation by Ames and Hall
The best thing for you to read will depend on the nature of your spiritual crisis, so hopefully one of these will appeal to you. :3
So I have a few suggestions that had a pretty significant impact on me spiritually:
1. Think on These Things by Jiddu Khrishnamurti
2. On Love and Loneliness by Jiddu Khrishnamurti
3. The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama
4. The Denial of Death by Thomas Becker (won Pulitzer prize)
5. Dao de Jing, a philosophical translation by Ames and Hall
The best thing for you to read will depend on the nature of your spiritual crisis, so hopefully one of these will appeal to you. :3
Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into them. :happynod:
Socrates- I love the idea of stoicism. Hard for me, but I try to practice this in my daily life as I'm an extremely emotional person.
Carl Jung- I came across MBTI and also randomly the notion of Synchronicity and I am extremely interested in all of his philosophical ideas.
Carl Jung- I came across MBTI and also randomly the notion of Synchronicity and I am extremely interested in all of his philosophical ideas.
Rowan Tree
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Simone Weil, GK Chesterton, Cormac McCarthy, Jakob Böhme, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Rumi, Dennis William Hauck.
Wow, that's an interesting pick. My brother is a massive fan of hers. Shame he doesn't speak English well, otherwise I'd invite him to join here.
Interestingly, he wrote a number of articles in a Catholic webzine last year, including one on Weil and another on Chesterton.
Rowan Tree
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Interestingly, he wrote a number of articles in a Catholic webzine last year, including one on Weil and another on Chesterton.
He sounds very interesting. I like how Weil's ideas of God, absence and metaxy come together in her theodicy. As for Chesterton, he's one of the most intensely quotable writers I have encountered—there's something almost addictive about reading him.
I am really bored with what is common these days as almost everything lacks depth and what is on the table for most people just doesn't cut it that there really isn't much behind it or things have been butchered at one point of another creating systems of control rather than encouraging spiritual growth. People like control and being controlled, they like systems that regulate and control rather than being free but worse still these systems allow parasites to become celebrity profiteers. It is a shame that the church is far off the mark compared to what it was in the first century and many of the books have either been suppressed, edited, or destroyed while dry dead traditions and doctrines of control have taken over. As for the modern age and the generations of today that reject it all together I find the shallowest of all that don't even try to find hope be it in any form that there is more beyond our demented slaughter house of a world. God was never at fault but rather the evil we have created ourselves brought us here.
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Another thing, every answer that I know for certain, it's never "magic."
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Impact Character
folding paper cranes ⭐
Nature..? Does that count?
like really really old forests and rain forests...?
design principles based on nature's math/form?
the thing that is going on when two people interact..when you feel the other person...?
the connecting circling moment you absorb the happiness of someone else.. you feel it.. you live it and show it to the outside world.. and then it echos back again?
a mexican native I drank champurrado with .. during the middle of the night on a bench in a zocalo.. sharing some very old words..
architecture principles of monumental space that use sunlight/darkness and create atmosphere... ?
like really really old forests and rain forests...?
design principles based on nature's math/form?
the thing that is going on when two people interact..when you feel the other person...?
the connecting circling moment you absorb the happiness of someone else.. you feel it.. you live it and show it to the outside world.. and then it echos back again?
a mexican native I drank champurrado with .. during the middle of the night on a bench in a zocalo.. sharing some very old words..
architecture principles of monumental space that use sunlight/darkness and create atmosphere... ?
D
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That's really interesting IC, I wonder...
Your comment about 'designing principles'; do you seek to find the most 'fundamental source' of ethical or moral principles?
Like, if only we looked, we would be able to see the pattern of right living in the very fabric of existence?