Ritual is important, yet often it is least beneficial to those people who are ritualistically-minded and inclined to habit. The word ‘tradition’ is now applied to many socially embedded religious and ‘spiritual’ practices that have become engrained within our cultures. Yet in many instances it is possible to replace the notion of ‘tradition’ with ‘repetition’. [...]
Much of what contemporary societies take to be ‘spirituality’ - rituals, talismans, practices, etc – have either been imported from elsewhere, appropriated from earlier forms, or become atrophied, frozen into symbol and peddled as emotional stimuli. Does this sound harsh? Well, what is often the case is that many once-legitimate spiritual practices have lost their [...]
Our species – homo sapiens sapiens - has been on a historically long evolutionary journey prior to arriving at the point where we now find ourselves. We have finally arrived at a world that is complex and interdependent; thus, making the right type of choices is hard but entirely critical. Whereas previously we perhaps had the ‘luxury’ [...]
‘It is no longer the time to be better, it is the time to be otherwise’ Satprem For thousands of years humanity has been conquerors. We never thought about opening our borders to entire nations; sharing resources; and grouping together as larger bodies of nations. We built fortresses, great walls, and opened our doors only [...]
To ‘break the spell’ of our many layers of social conditioning is not as difficult as it sounds. The first step is one of awareness; that is, to acknowledge within ourselves that our personas are part social-construct put together from a whole range of external impacts that we receive as part of growing up. In [...]
For many people modern life can be said to have become an unbalanced distraction; or rather, the reality of our daily lives is a constant ‘attention distracter’. We suffer not from an attention deficit but from ‘attention overload’. This often then results in endless instances of misplaced attention. Too many of our social events, devices, [...]
Sincerity – with others and with oneself – is one of the few tools we have for gaining our personal freedom. The value of sincerity is of great importance, now more than ever, as we are surrounded by tales, stories, and gossip, selling us such things as immediate ascension, new ‘light bodies’, cataclysmic futures, and [...]
For many of us, 2012 has felt like it's been a continued test of endurance as aspects of our lives undergo change and challenge. Ever since the financial markets crashed in September 2008, the globalized world of international media has been telling us that we are all in crisis. The banks, we are told, are [...]
Human life upon this planet, it seems, is about to undergo a period of transition that will test our capacity to re-adapt and re-emerge on an unprecedented scale. Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves -- what type of "revolutions" are we set to face on this "small planet" of ours in the days and [...]
There is an old folktale that tells of the wise fool who arrives at the door of the king's castle asking for entry. He is immediately told by the guard that the king's decree is for anyone who tells a lie to be hanged. Then, upon asking for his destination, the wise fool replies, "I [...]
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you… … Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it (Rudyard Kipling – ‘If’) The above lines - taken from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If - serves to remind us that we have gained the Earth, our sense [...]
The incumbent global financial system is in dire straits and is a behemoth waiting to implode. It is intrinsically unsustainable with its labyrinthine financial agreements and credit swaps. These include mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, predatory lending, derivatives and off-balance sheet financing, etc. The financial system has become an almost impossible marketplace [...]
