new age spirituality

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  • Everyone is Special

    We seem to be living through a culture of celebrity. We are surrounded by celebrity magazines, TV shows etc. Many people are obsessed with looking, and being, just like their celebrity heroes.

    In the 60’s Andy Warhol said “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Judging from some of bit-part soap actors and one-hit pop singers now deemed “celebrities”, the future is now. But is it healthy?

    Most of us have heroes – actors, sportspeople, people who seem to accomplish more than we ever could. We naturally look up to these people as role models, try to emulate them – as best we can.

    Heroes serve as guides, showing us what is possible if we choose to live constructively. And that is good.

    But like all things, heroes – or rather our attitude towards them – needs to be kept in perspective. Every single living entity is special, be they president, superstar, the guy in drugstore or the tramp at the corner of the street. We have all chosen to be born with a specific purpose. And that includes ourselves.

    For all their achievements, our heroes too are human, with human imperfections.

    By all means have and admire your heroes. Learn from and be inspired by them. But have no lesser respect for any other human being, for when the flesh is stripped away as one day it surely shall, what will remain of all – including you – is an eternal Spirit. And that is very special indeed.

  • There is no death

    The death of the physical body is life’s only certainty, so why do we fear this inevitability?

    Is it because the ultimate unknown jars with our innate desire for certainty? Or perhaps because we have been scared by religious teachings of hell and eternal suffering? Or do we merely dread the possibility of our own annihilation and the complete futility of our lives that such a prospect implies.

    Whatever the reason, it is fear that is futile.

    Our new article Why do we fear death? discusses the origins of and advises on how it may be overcome.

    Rational science teaches that we are mere automata, chance freaks of nature that just happened to be thrown together by the winds of fate. Rational science is without peer within the physical domain. And yet beyond this realm is utterly impotent. Science cannot even begin to address questions of the Spirit.

    There are countless reasons for optimism that our inner essence survives physical death. Numerous individual accounts of contact with departed loved ones, a mass of evidence from clairvoyant mediumship, near death experiences, reincarnation…

  • God under attack

    The recently published God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens is the latest in a long series of attacks on the concept of God.

    One of its more prominent predecessors is The God Delusion by acclaimed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, backed up by a national television series in the UK.

    In the days before mass education it was easy to use the pulpit image of a judgemental God to keep the ignorant masses under control. Be god, work hard and there’s a place in heaven waiting, but step over the line and it’s eternal damnation.

    These days such ideas are rightly condemned as superstitious nonsense. What loving father could possibly watch his children suffer as so many do on earth, especially when much of that suffering is inflicted by the hands of his other children, and even more especially when much of this is done in the name of “God” (witness the “war on terror” aka Christendom vs Islam!). That’s not a God many would want to be associated with.

    Science has given us cars and planes, microwaves and refrigerators, TVs and stereos, cell phones and the Internet… It’s cured many of the ailments that once killed us. Who needs the white-bearded old man on a cloud any more, especially when he doesn’t seem to lift a finger to solve our problems.

    Science is indeed king. But… only within its own domain the 4-dimensional world of space-time composed of matter and energy. Here it reigns supreme. Trouble is there’s more to reality than this. It can’t explain our Spiritual dimension, the myriad accounts of anomalous phenomena experienced throughout history and now being confirmed in the scientist’s laboratories. It can’t explain why we’ve long felt the need to follow religions/superstitions (depending on your point of view) or to express our most abstract thoughts through art, literature and music.

    Even science recognizes its own limitations. In studying the origind of the universe the equations break down at a certain point in what’s known as singularities. The single most successful theory of quantum mechanics is based on an inherent randomness (or indeterminacy).

    No, God isn’t always good (whatever good may mean), because in incarnating we are possessed of free will. If God were to intervene every time we had trouble we’d sure have an easy ride, but we would learn nothing, and would be no more than automata acting out a script. In short our earthly existence would be pointless.

    One answer to Dawkins and Hitchens is offered by Dawkins’ fellow Oxford professor and scientific theologian, Alister McGrath in The Dawkins Delusion.

    If you read Dawkins, Hitchens or both, in the interest of balance you owe it to yourself to read McGrath.

  • Live Earth – Planetary Crisis or Global Con

    Yesterday’s Live Earth concerts aimed at raising awareness of the impending environmental crisis were seen by some 2 billion people around the planet.

    There is near unanimity amongst leading scientists that the future of the world hangs in the balance unless mankind starts to take action now. There has recently been major and growing publicity over the issue and few of the people that matter can plead ignorance after yesterday’s concerts.

    And yet still cynicism / doubts remain:

    • Is there really a crisis or is it being exaggerated. If we don nothing it’ll just go away / come to nothing – a bit like the millennium bug that was supposed to crash the worlds computers at midnight on Jan 31st 1999…
    • It’s simply a bandwagon for power-hungry politicos to jump on, let’s not fuel their ego trips…
    • Maybe there’s a crisis, but I’ll be long dead and gone by the time the sh!t hits the fan…
    • Maybe there’s a crisis, but it’s the megacorporations causing it, recycling my garbage ain’t gonna make much difference…
    • Live Earth is just a gimmick – the music was good but how much pollution did it cost shipping in all those artists & fans and powering all the sound systems, lighting…

    All valid arguments of course. But the facts are:

    • Planet earth is a marvellous creation – perhaps not the only life supporting planet in the cosmos, but the only one we’ve so far found despite all our high-powered technology…
    • The way everything all fits together to support life is little short of miraculous. Isn’t that worth making some sacrifice to keep…
    • Maybe we can’t save the planet on our own, bt if we each do our bit, that’s a lot of individuals contributing to one gynormous group effort…
    • Through lobbying and simply in the choices we make in spending our money even the little people (or enough of them together) can influence the megacorporations…

    At a time when we seem more at conflict than ever, doesn’t it give us a chance to show the benefits of working together for a common purpose.

  • 07/07/07 – a lucky day?

    In England, and probably around the globe, people are preparing to celebrate the particularly lucky date of 07/07/07 – many by getting married.

    Seven has long been considered a lucky number across cultures, and the last similarly lucky date goes back 30 years to July 7th 1977. But let us not forget the London public transport bombings on 7/7 just two years ago.

    So can a date, or a number be lucky? It can certainly carry certain vibrations, which then combine with the specific vibrations of the participants and where there is a fortuitous match then it is likely to be lucky.

    But probably far more important is the degree to which those doing something special on this date believe it to be lucky, for what we believe carries far more potency than isolated numbers.

    So tomorrow, some people will have a good day, others not so good, and for a few it will be bloody awful, but by staying positive you can make it as good for you as it possibly can be.

    The bottom line: be aware of lucky numbers, omens etc, but be also aware that our own beliefs and actions carry far more power than merely indicative symbols.

  • Roswell 60 years on – the mystery deepens

    This month sees the 60th anniversary of the most famous unresolved UFO mystery of them all, ie Roswell. It is said that a UFO crashed near the city of Roswell, New Mexico, USA, and that debris of the craft as well as bodies of aliens were recovered by the US military. The US government has repeatedly denied this version of events, claiming instead that what crashed was a research balloon.

    A recent interesting twist comes from a sworn affidavit from Walter G Haut, public information officer at Roswell base during the Roswell incident, to be released only after his death. Haut passed away in 2005 and the affidavit, now public, reveals a military cover-up and that he witnessed first hand both the alien craft and the bodies of its crew.

    The universe is certainly a big place, and though intelligent life may be sparse it is highly arrogant to consider it limited to earth. It is also highly arrogant to assume that no life more intelligent than ourselves exists elsewhere. Given the likelihood it does. isn’t there a possibility that it happens to be aware of us and has an interest in our development?

    Alternatively, isn’t it strange how reports of UFOs increased dramatically during the military expansionism of the cold war and development of faster, more efficient flying machines on earth?

  • Mistakes are Good

    You’re imperfect. I’m imperfect. We’re all imperfect. We are born in this world to learn, and if we were perfect we’d have no reason to be here. We all make mistakes. And all too often we beat ourselves up about it. We fret about what our mistakes have cost us, and how much damage we’ve done…..

    Instead we should be happy to make mistakes. We should be happy that firstly they show we are very special beings because we actually have the power (free will) to do things. We should be happy because every mistake is a chance to learn, and that’s what it’s all about. And we should be happy because mistakes at least show we are doing things rather than just idly vegetating.

    I’m not saying we should become reckless and deliberately make mistakes or not try to get things right. But we should acknowledge that making the most of the precious gift of life means doing, and doing means we’ll sometimes/often get it wrong.

    Mistakes don’t matter. Earthly achievements don’t matter. The only thing that matters is the experience we acquire.

  • No-mindness – mushin no shin

    Zen and Japanese Culture

    Suzuki’s classic Zen and Japanese Culture talks at length about the unlikely relationship between the peaceful Buddhist faith and the brutality of the Samurai swordsman. It seems the most effective swordsmen had to go beyond mere mastery of technique to cultivate a state of mind known as ‘mushin no shin’, or no-mindness. In this state there is no conscious thought, no attempt to analyse the opponent’s movements nor to consider their own. Instead the conscious mind is emptied or switched off with control being handed to the “unconscious”. I guess this means our Spiritual essence takes over with the body becoming like a robot.

    Luckily most of us will never have to face the life and death struggles so familiar to the Samurai. But we can all benefit from cultivating mushin no shin. We tend to feel and think too much. In Jungian terminology we rely too much on emotion and intellect, and not enough on intuition (and sensation).

    The modern technologically-driven world over-emphasizes intellectual analysis. Sure, this has put men on the moon and found cures for many diseases. But it hasn’t found a way to get people to co-exist in peace, and neither are its methods appropriate to many of the subjective questions humans face.

    At such times we can over-analyze, think too much. Instead, there comes a time to put the matter to one side, embrace the situation, question etc. without thought or feeling. Just respond instinctively.

    No-mindness is no excuse for inadequate preparation for life’s events (eg not studying for an exam) nor for failing to acquire and continue to acquire a good education and broad experience. Such things are essential, for when we submit to the unconscious it is our prior knowledge that will be drawn on in determining our actions.

  • Letting God Decide

    You’re trying to achieve something difficult. You give it your best shot, from planning through execution. But there comes a point where you can do no more. At this point we may say “let God decide”. Provided you’ve given your best efforts this is no abdication of responsibility.
    If your most desired outcome is the one that best fulfills your life purpose then it will happen. If it doesn’t then you have no regrets, ‘coz you did everything you could and God’s decision was not this time.

    Letting God decide can also work when faced with a difficult choice between different but equally attractive options. Give each the chance to develop. You may find that one path opens up while the other(s) close down, or the right choice becomes clearer in your mind. God has decided.

    But letting God decide is no excuse for laziness or timidity. The gift of life is a precious one. We come with a particular purpose and the responsibility to pursue it as best we can. God doesn’t help those that don’t help themselves. Sitting back and waiting for an opportunity almost certainly guarantees it will never come.

  • Men and the Moon

    The BBC reported recently that extra police officers are to be deployed in Brighton at full moon. A police spokesperson is reported as saying “Research carried out by us has shown a correlation between violent incidents and full moons.”

    This story gives scientific credibility to the ancient belief that we are influenced by heavenly bodies in general and the moon in particular, most notably expressed in the legend of the werewolf.

    The lesson is that we should be open minded about a whole range of things that affect us that we can’t yet explain. Human beings are complex things as is the environment we exist in. By being a bit more humble about our understanding we will be better able to progress scientifically and Spiritually.