Spiritual
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Returning to the Shaman to Move Forward
In a taped lecture by Alan Watts, he discussed a 1957 paper by mythologist Joseph Campbell, “The Symbol Without Meaning” In it, Campbell explained the beginning, development, and dissolution of cosmologies or great…
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The Dog Whisperer and the Ego
Have you ever watched Cesar Milan’s show, The Dog Whisperer? Its newest rendition is called Better Human, Better Dog. It’s very spiritual. In the show, Cesar Milan, a dog trainer, takes on challenging…
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Empedocles and Spiritual Determinism
When I began writing this series on Peter Kingsley’s view of Empedocles, I thought it would be just one article. Now I am on my fifth article. Each time I think my next…
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Empedocles: Cosmologist and Magician: Part II
In my last article, “Empedocles: Cosmologist and Magician,” linked here, I laid out Empedocles’ story of the cosmos and his story of the soul and merged the two. For background, please read that article.…
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Empedocles: Cosmologist and Magician
It’s interesting to look back in history some 2500 years and see how far we haven’t come. Empedocles was an ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 492 BCE to 432 BCE. He was a…
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Evil and the Intelligent Universe
We must look at evil from a new paradigm to understand it—the old paradigm of seeing good and evil as absolutes no longer works. Humans are much too complex for that. The new…
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Give It Up: You Can’t Improve Yourself!
I recently heard this line, “You can’t improve yourself,” in a talk by Alan Watts. It struck me in two ways. First, it was rather depressing to think that I couldn’t improve this…
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Our Lived Life
Should we base our life on abstract ideas, or should our “lived life” dictate those abstract ideas? Off the cuff, many of us say, of course, our lived life should dictate those ideas.…
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Four Features of a Mystical Experience
What is the role of consciousness in the study of the universe and our life here on earth? We take our everyday consciousness as our default setting, thinking it gives us the proper…