Comments on: End games

By: Glen Rees Your Spiritual Nutrition researcher

Glen Rees Your Spiritual Nutrition researcher — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 02:13:48 +0000

The true universalizing of religion is to practice the extremely simple concept of LOVING Self, & others unconditionally…Unfortunately; Easy to say, Hard to perform!
In truth to express Love IS the universalizing of us all. Transecending ALL religions.
For the true glory of love allows the Jew to marry the Hindu, the Muslem to marry the Christian, etc. It happens. Sure not much, but it has been cited many times.

Indeed some would say that even describing the term Love in itself is limiting… Many seers just describe the ‘is-ness of being’.
However most would conceptually accept that love is a product of our heart expressing itself or What I call the ‘heart-mind’ which is the centre of a trinity linking us to the now, the eternal now(that is-ness of being).

One of your contributors above quotes Piet Hut referencing; “I would prefer to focus on an authentic attention for what it means to live a life from a deep respect for the full human condition, with head and heart and guts and all our faculties, in a fully integrated way”

Might we totally concur his concept of describing ‘Head, heart & gut’ to enlarge by saying that to accurately describe a human MUST infer a trinity. To-wit Piet’s
Head, heart & gut becomes our model of being Human; the Head-mind, heart-mind & Gut-minds.
To view this concept more graphically please the diagram at our Spiritual
nutrition page.

Models help us humans rationalize ‘occult(hidden) concepts’.

Warmly Glen F Rees BSc, ND

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 03:19:20 +0000

Peter – Yup, that’s what I meant.

I don’t think I’m any kind of authentic teacher. But you might be!

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:54:35 +0000

O.K., Dale, here are some titles that should keep you occupied for a while, in no particular order. These are all books I enjoyed, in most cases because the writing was top-notch. Richard Katz, Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kung Peggy Rockman Napaljarri and Lee Cataldi, Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman Victor Turner, Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven Ruth Murray Underhill, Singing for Power Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: the Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians Barbara Tedlock, The Beautiful and the Dangerous Philip M. Peek, ed., African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing John Pemberton III, Insight and Artistry in African Divination Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:16:08 +0000

The end-of-life coach. Do you answer your own question? Should I look for any authentic teacher?

Because I think your thought is interesting.

By: dale

dale — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:52:08 +0000

Yes, I’d like that very much! Thanks.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:45:26 +0000

Dale – There are certainly areas of the world where people have something approaching that view (though it would be more accurate to translate their words for outsiders as “sorcerers” rather than “heathens,” I think), but there are many others where people have enthusiastically traded sacred songs and dances between tribes. In many cases, I think, there has been a potent mixture of both impulses, because everyone knows that the stranger’s medicine is more powerful than one’s own.

The first step is to concede that Others are real people.

No doubt. We are indeed fortunate that our own thinking, sometime in the late 20th century, finally approached the broadmindedness of the average 17th-century Iroquios. I’d be happy to suggest a reading list of good, accessible works on tribal and village-based religious traditions, if you’re interested.

By: dale

dale — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:25:59 +0000

I wonder whether tribal traditions, rather than being tolerant or self-consciously local, often simply don’t regard people outside their own community as people at all. They may think all their taboos and rituals are required and effective for all *real* people; what the heathens do in the way of worship or ritual is not criticized, not because it’s just as pleasing to the significant higher powers, but because the significant higher powers don’t give a damn what non-persons do. In that sense I think that the three religions you mention are indeed universalizing, and that in some ways, it’s a good thing. They insist that all people are in fact people, just as capable of pleasing or displeasing God, or attaining enlightenment, as any local, no matter what language they speak or what race they are.

No one dislikes missionaries more than I do, but I think that our intercultural sensitivities and openness derive — often very directly — from the universalism that drove (and drives) missionary activity. The first step is to concede that Others are real people. After that you can concede that their spiritual practices and pieties may be as meaningful and valid as your own. But the second step can’t really happen without the first.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:02:59 +0000

That is a good quote -- thanks for sharing it. And it's true that the beliefs and practices of tribal peoples cannot be so easily divided into religius and non-religious, or even (pace Mircea Eliade) sacred and profane. I am not urging a return to pre-modern religiosity, but I do feel that learning about non-Western and non-Eastern ways of thinking and being-in-the-world can be enormously enriching.

By: Teju

Teju — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:00:25 +0000

The astrophysicist Piet Hut is a favorite thinker of mine, and I like what he has to say on the subject of religion and spirituality:

“…the very terms `religion’ and `spirituality’ I find deeply problematic and, frankly, I wish I could avoid using them altogether. Instead of using those lightning rods, I would prefer to focus on an authentic attention for what it means to live a life from a deep respect for the full human condition, with head and heart and guts and all our faculties, in a fully integrated way. Most any culture has placed the cultivation of a full and all-round form of personhood at the top of their agenda. In China for example, Confucianists and Taoists alike, notwithstanding all their differences, focused on the cultivation of our full humanity, the former starting from our societal embedding, the latter from the way we are still part of nature. Our contemporary western culture is strangely lacking in this respect…”

I agree, completely.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:33:18 +0000

Dale and Lorianne – Thanks for the comments. I wasn’t trying to be obscure, honest! But Lorianne seems to have figured out what I meant pretty well. Local cults and tribal religions often don’t address what we think of as ultimate concerns at all, or only obliquely, through initiation and death rites. One might even prefer to view the average shaman or diviner as something more akin to a modern psychotherapist. But to me, it’s more useful to turn it around and look at the universalizing religions in an evolutionary context, from the perspective of the original world religion — shamanism — and realize that what religion is about more than anything else is healing, making whole, reintegrating the individual and/or the tribe into the cosmos. (My fascination with Judaism above all other traditions stems from the fact that it retains many tribal aspects, such as a passionate attachment to particular places, while also being intensely bookish and cerebral.)

I’m quite willing to believe that Dale’s sangha doesn’t teach that the Buddha dharma is the only, or even the best, way. If anything, I think, American Buddhists have been perhaps too shy about promoting their own views. But I have been annoyed by the tendency of some Buddhists I’ve run across in the blogosphere to put down other religions, especially Christianity, evincing the same kind of hauteur that I see in many of my fellow anarchists: “How can any reasonable person possibly disagree with us, since our system is so self-evidently correct?”