Education Spirituality Forum
Date: May 25th, 2012 7:50:15 am - Subscribe
Mood: blessed
Baptized Christians in grace are said to live in the super-natural order. I was taught that the beauty of one in santifying grace is beyond the beauty of the natural universe.
Receiving clerical orders, however, I felt no super-natural change in wearing the religious habit, getting the tonsure, receiving priestly powers, including supposely changing bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
Returning to the lay state, I found the super-natural order (grace or damnation, blessedness or hell) to be a doctrinal figment.
Nature is where I thrive-- like fish in the water-- to find fullness in life.
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Education Spiriutality Forum
Date: May 23rd, 2012 8:52:05 pm - Subscribe
Mood: misled
14th century Richard St. Victor said: contemplation alone enables us to see God, and then only 'in a glass, darkly.'
Contemplation varies from simple musing/sensing God's ominipresence in nature (amidst foliage, hillside, mountain top. . .) or the more elaborate Ignatian imagining events in Jesus' life like a movie and stopping for talk-prayer. Ignatius also taught imagining hell and heaven to excite fear or bliss.
Only in a glass darkly or not at all, as folks see/revere not God, but images or statues of Jesus, Mary, the saints--Catholic popular contemplation.
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Education Spirituality Forum
Date: May 21st, 2012 9:25:57 pm - Subscribe
Mood: tranquil
Parallel to Erikson, Abraham Moslow saw stages of (spiritual) self-actualization:
Conventional experience of culture, independence in self-growth, self acceptance of one's own imperfect nature, deep feelings of kinship, appreciating blessings in life, real humor vs hostility, increased efficiency and originality, focus on basic issues and moral standards, concern with eternal questions, experience of limitless mystical horizons.
Religious doctrine that life is a brief trial to save one's soul in heaven and avoid eternal hell denies man's capacity for self-actualization in life.
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Education Spiriutality Forum
Date: May 21st, 2012 9:02:18 pm - Subscribe
Mood: sunny
What does spiritual development mean?
Erik Erikson pointed at stages to a healthy personality, key points to spiritual change:
Basic trust (vs mistrust), autonomy (vs shame, doubt), initiative (vs guilt), industry (vs inferiority), identity (vs role confusion), intimacy (isolation), generativity (vs stagnation), and ego integrity (vs despair).
Educated in a religious culture, I was shy, felt guilt and inferiority. Only in a progressive Jesuit seminary did I develop ego identity and self integrity. Outgrowing a Catholic guilt complex, I feel liberation of my spiritual self.
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Education Spirituality Forum
Date: May 19th, 2012 10:11:52 pm - Subscribe
Mood: objective
Pseudo-physicists say Yogis do tommo-- sit naked on a mountain all night, overcome the winter cold with heat energy from mind consciousness.
Reducing physical reality to an illusion or maya has been man's difficulty for ages. The report that 70,000 pilgrims failed to see the Virgin in Fatima but saw a whirling sun that dried their clothes is either mass hallucination or mass disinformation.
Hitler mesmerized a whole population of 8 million people to believe in the creation of a super-Aryan race, alike the prevailing religious belief in the supernatural order of things.
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