In a “Bird of Spirit” blog entry from October, 2011, titled “Buddhism Versus Franklinism,” I alluded to “the Buddhist notion of destroying the self.” Recently, I received a correction on this statement from a professional colleague named Dave Merrill, who is a local Buddhist practitioner and student teacher of the Buddha path. Dave also teaches [...]
Archive for January, 2012
A Correction to “Buddhism Versus Franklinism”
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2012 |
Bliss-Consciousness and God
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2012 |
Most of us have experienced a few fleeting moments of bliss in our lives, often at completely unexpected moments. In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert describes her release at finally achieving such a state, after years of crippling depression, during a long group meditation at an ashram in India. In Chapter 1 of “Man Seeks [...]
Reaching Toward the Bird of Spirit: a Personal Memoir
Posted in Uncategorized on January 18, 2012 |
What does it mean to believe in God without being a Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu? Is it even possible? Society wants to label each and every one of us according to our religion as well as our race, gender and sexual orientation, as if society cannot function without categorizing us. Traditional societies would also [...]
Sin, Sleeping and Awakening
Posted in Uncategorized on January 18, 2012 |
At the risk of stating the obvious, Christianity’s starting assumption is that we are all sinners until we are saved by Christ. While it certainly cannot be denied that man commits wrongs on a daily basis, I believe that regarding ourselves as essentially sinful can be just as harmful to spiritual growth as it can [...]
Living with Samsara
Posted in Uncategorized on January 16, 2012 |
“Samsara” is a Sanskrit word meaning the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Samsara is closely associated with the human predilection for attachment to all the pleasures and pains of the world. In turn, the dualistic nature of pleasure and pain, two threads coiled together as inextricably as the two spiraling strands in a molecule [...]
