Considerations
What are the lodestones that can guide your ethical, Spiritual, and psychological journey through life?
Or…
Are you tragically destined *to stumble around on your own, alienated and isolated from larger currents and contexts of meaning?
How do you integrate the deep knowing of your heart aflame with the sober detachment of third-person study such as Science?
How do you weave together your profound desire for the Eros of sacred community with the prized autonomy and vaunted pseudo-skepticism of Western education?
And if you are to find your way back to the space of inner insight held by the lineages, which lineage to choose?
Historically you have been limited to the particular truth of your lineage. The problem is that this particular truth all too often seemed to deny or contradict many of the intuitively important teachings you heard from other paths.
You responded to this conscious or unconscious confusion on one of three core ways.
1. Sometimes you abandoned Spirit altogether and turned to the brilliant- if flatland – guides * of third-person objective knowledge. You looked to psychology to guide your inner process and for relational love to illuminate your heart. You looked to science to provide order and implicit meaning in your life.
But it did not quite work.
You greatly honored the wisdom of science. You appreciated the dignities it afforded you. Yet it’s flatland limitation and exterior functional orientation could never address the deepest yearning of your heart. **Without a firm grounding in the depth of Spirit you expected too much from your “Special Relationship”. In fact you became addicted to your “Special Relationship” expecting it to be a panacea for all of your dis-ease. The result: Your Special Relationship collapsed under the weight of pressure it was never meant to bare.
2. Sometimes you abandoned the core insights of modernity and post-modernity and aligned yourself with the goods of an old religion.
Even though you knew that it did not quite all hang together…
In your calculus, the goods of community, ethical guidance and personal relationship with the source of all being outweighed the shadows of the religious system you chose.
So you compartmentalized your life with the modern and post-modern person showing up in the world and the pre-modern old time religionist showing up at home and in church.
More often then not you took the third way.
3. You became a dilettante consumer of Spirituality from wherever you could get it. At the same time that you absorbed the truth of modern science you imbibed the post-modern critiques of all objective truth. You never really worked it out. Your heart sometimes opened, but most of the time remained closed. You had occasional wondrous experiences of community, but most of the time you were alone. You were not sure how to even begin to integrate your Spiritual knowing and beliefs into a coherent system by which to guide your life. So you latched on to some aphorisms, perhaps a practice here and there and started to try and navigate your way through life.
What are the lodestones that can guide your ethical, Spiritual, and psychological journey through life?
Or…
Are you tragically destined *to stumble around on your own, alienated and isolated from larger currents and contexts of meaning?
How do you integrate the deep knowing of your heart aflame with the sober detachment of third-person study such as Science?
How do you weave together your profound desire for the Eros of sacred community with the prized autonomy and vaunted pseudo-skepticism of Western education?
And if you are to find your way back to the space of inner insight held by the lineages, which lineage to choose?
Historically you have been limited to the particular truth of your lineage. The problem is that this particular truth all too often seemed to deny or contradict many of the intuitively important teachings you heard from other paths.
You responded to this conscious or unconscious confusion on one of three core ways.
1. Sometimes you abandoned Spirit altogether and turned to the brilliant- if flatland – guides * of third-person objective knowledge. You looked to psychology to guide your inner process and for relational love to illuminate your heart. You looked to science to provide order and implicit meaning in your life.
But it did not quite work.
You greatly honored the wisdom of science. You appreciated the dignities it afforded you. Yet it’s flatland limitation and exterior functional orientation could never address the deepest yearning of your heart. **Without a firm grounding in the depth of Spirit you expected too much from your “Special Relationship”. In fact you became addicted to your “Special Relationship” expecting it to be a panacea for all of your dis-ease. The result: Your Special Relationship collapsed under the weight of pressure it was never meant to bare.
2. Sometimes you abandoned the core insights of modernity and post-modernity and aligned yourself with the goods of an old religion.
Even though you knew that it did not quite all hang together…
In your calculus, the goods of community, ethical guidance and personal relationship with the source of all being outweighed the shadows of the religious system you chose.
So you compartmentalized your life with the modern and post-modern person showing up in the world and the pre-modern old time religionist showing up at home and in church.
More often then not you took the third way.
3. You became a dilettante consumer of Spirituality from wherever you could get it. At the same time that you absorbed the truth of modern science you imbibed the post-modern critiques of all objective truth. You never really worked it out. Your heart sometimes opened, but most of the time remained closed. You had occasional wondrous experiences of community, but most of the time you were alone. You were not sure how to even begin to integrate your Spiritual knowing and beliefs into a coherent system by which to guide your life. So you latched on to some aphorisms, perhaps a practice here and there and started to try and navigate your way through life.
No comments:
Post a Comment