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Uplifting writing: Personal experiences, poems, guided meditations, short stories and news items that calm our mood, or inspire a spiritual meaning that takes us beyond life’s daily troubles.
The arts: Reviews of music, fiction, visual arts etc. from a spiritual angle.
Consciousness: Study of altered states of consciousness is revealing new insights into the human condition and these states are an important part of spiritual experience especially the sense of unity reported by many mystics.
Spiritual healing: Focusing on how personal happiness can come through spiritual healing.
Meaning of life: Focusing on the meaning of life, relationships, the experience of humanity, the human soul and divine presence.
Ethics: Here you will find posts that try to apply spiritual ideas to political, social and moral issues.
Swedenborg: Addressing the following questions. Who was Swedenborg? What did he have to say? Why does he get mentioned so much? Who are his readers?
What’s New: Information about new events – workshops, courses, retreats, conferences, and other spiritual events.
When you speak of spiritual questions are you talking about religion?
For some people religion has become an undesirable thing. Many wicked things have been done in its name. And some religious beliefs I find abhorrent. Yet there’s no getting away from it, the notion of a deeper spiritual reality indicates a meaning of life that transcends what our eyes and ears can tell us. It is a highly personal perception that cannot be proved by science yet for me is a divine spiritual healing force deep within the human soul.
What is your interest in doing this blog?
I’m interested in sharing ideas about feeling good and healthy; insights about human happiness and spiritual healing and growth. Not easy subjects to talk about.
No-one likes to feel dissatisfied, bored or fed up. We often get immersed in problems of living. Our news media seem to think that only if something bad happens they must report it. It is as if they cannot see the good news all around them. However, for those looking for a way forward towards inner contentment and delight in life, there is much that is inspiring to see if one looks for it. I believe it often means engaging in meaningful relationships and activities. Also finding a framework of ideas that help with a spiritual meaning of life.
I so agree with you. If you believe all you hear in the media it seems like a horrible world. How can we change this?
Change the world or change or view?
Have you ever stepped into a gym? How would you descibe the atmosphere there?
This world is not meant for our comfort or pleasure, we are here to build and develop our spirit. Sometimes that can stink. Muscles are not built without resistance, love is not developed without temptations.
We can’t have water, or even power washers, without also tsunamies.
Carly asks how we can change the media. I suppose one possibility is to write letters to newspaper editors giving examples of good news that isn’t getting into the papers. The Uplifting writing link on the menu may give some examples.
What I find interesting about the media is that it needs to reflects the interests of the general population; a kind of sounding board for our inner state. More and more people are waking up to the fact that we need to restore some sort of moral or even spiritual guidance. The world, up to now, has been lead by blind obedience – we are becoming grown-ups now and maybe we need to start realising our potential. It doesn’t need to be like it is! and I say we need to start taking individual responsibility and act collectively to rearrange our priorities.
Here’s a spiritual question. What does ‘spirituality’ mean?
I rather like the definition given in Wikipedia.
“Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live.”
“Spiritual practices …develop an individual’s inner life; such practices often lead to an experience of connectedness with a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine realm…”
Have you ever been in love? This is the nearest many people get to seeing others as God or Jesus sees them. Swedenborg’s book, Conjugial or Married Love is his own reflection on this relationship. The experience is a useful peg on which to hang reflections on the essence of our being, and a standpoint from which to view his views.
David
I read your comment out to my wife Carole and she said
“They say love is blind, but there’s a difference between blind love that is a sort of infatuation that doesn’t see the faults in a person and a love that accepts the person warts and all and can see the beloved’s potential. I think that’s the sort of love we get from God.”
Steve
Does Swedenborg say anything about the sovereignty of God, and if so, what exactly is it?
Is God sovereign? According to Swedenborg the answer depends on what we mean by sovereign.
There is an underlying order in all creation maintained by the Creator’s universal laws on all levels.
All these laws arise from aspects of God’s Love and Wisdom.
The goal of God’s Love is the happiness of eternal life for all.
God governs not only life in general but also the very smallest details imaginable.
However, this control never intrudes into our inner freedom of choice. For without our individual co-operation we could never receive the happiness of eternal life from our Divine Source. If God compelled our belief by external means we would not change inwardly.
Therefore God must provide for us invisibly – otherwise we would no longer have freedom to ascribe events to God’s Providence or to chance.
God’s providence always looks to the final goal of our eternal life.
Evil things are permitted for the sake of this end.
It is in retrospect that we can notice that the traumas in our lives have functioned as growth points.
I’ve based this account on Emanuel Swedenborg: Essential Readings edited by Michael Stanley (published by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California in the Western Esoteric Masters Series).
Is there a difference between spirituality and piety?
Thanks for your question Barabara, You wrote is there a difference between spirituality and piety?
I would suggest not all pious people are spiritual and not all spiritual people are pious.
Piety means devotion and reverence to God and dutiful observance of religious principles. According to psychologist Gordon Allport, the beliefs of many religious people are what really lie behind their whole approach to life. These are said to have an ‘intrinsic religious orientation’. Their private prayers carry much meaning and personal emotion. These surely are spiritual people.
Research has found that some people affiliated with religion have a low score on ‘intrinsic orientation’. And so I would suggest not all pious people are deeply spiritual. And this is why sometimes the word ‘piety’ is used to denote a conspicuous devoutness or less often even a sanctimonious self-righteousness associated with being hypocritical.
Also in my view not all genuinely spiritual people can be described as pious. Daniel Bateson, who completed doctoral studies in both theology and psychology, described the ‘quest orientation’ characterised by complexity, doubt, and tentativeness. Here we find a spiritual kind of person with an open-ended, responsive dialogue with existential questions raised by the contradictions and tragedies of life.
In his book The Spirituality Revolution ,David Tacey compared a conventional to a deeper approach to religion. He wrote that the latter is a spiritual approach which is “based on personal experience, tolerant towards difference, compassionate towards those who make different life choices, and relatively free of ideological fanaticism.”
This may not initially sound spirtiual, but take good care of your body. It is a precious gift from God.Exercise has been found to be as effective as medication at relieving depression.Also, repent of any sins that are keeping you from feeling the love of God. Confess to Him, promise Him that you will not go back to your sins, and then ask Him to make you clean through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. These both helped me a lot.
Is the term God not counter to your second item in “Now for some dont’s”
“Avoid using traditional religious language and jargon (no matter one’s own conventional way of speaking)”
In Buddhism for example Buddha is not referred to as a God. Personally I believe in a certain sense there is a spiritual aspect to not only man but all living creatures. I don’t believe in, as wikipedia define God “a singular being in theistic and deistic religions”.
David
Like David, I believe that there is a spiritual aspect to not only man but all living creatures. Having said that, I don’t actually know if he and I have the same understanding of the word ‘spiritual’. Mere language is not always up to the job of sharing deeper insights. The same goes for the word ‘God’ that has a mixture of connotations. I suspect that people don’t understand God in the same way. It is a pity I haven’t been following the editorial guideline about avoiding traditional religious language and jargon.
I do belief in love and light as the source of our being. This might have been a more helpful way of expressing myself. My problem is that the word God is one that is in common usage. Nevertheless, perhaps instead of saying God is love and light it is more helpful to say Love and Light together are what have been called God.
This is because divine love and light flow into everything and so nothing exists apart from this spiritual life. If the divine is the life or being in everything then it is just as true to say that nothing has any being on its own.
Thus humane compassion and wisdom is the creative source of the universe (hence Swedenborg’s concept of the Divine Humanity). I can accept the idea that the divine needs us in order to become fully real and this can only happen if we are willing to receive divine humanity into our hearts and minds. It is the way to find an end to suffering and craving.
Just a very short comment. Ed, why talk about Love and Light while Swedenborg talks about Love and Wisdom and compares them to the sun’s warmth and light?
God has a wonderful siiapturl organization and all of them love one another and are united in worship and peace. The very best way I have found to overcome depression is to surround myself with them and associate with them on a regular basis, to keep busy in teaching and preaching about God’s kingdom government that will restore the earth to it’s original paradise-like conditions and drawing close to God by reading and meditating on the Bible as God’s letter to all of us which is full of siiapturl treasures.
hey, been seeing some weird Synchronicity recently and been researching into it and spiritual awakening has been suggested what does this mean and have you got any other views on the signs im seeing.
Hi Emma
Could you say a little about the signs you are seeing? Cheers Stephen
well it all started when my partner left me suddenly i kept seeing 3′s everywhere and i thought no i’m just trying to make signs but then everything ties into our relationship like 3′s are EVERYWHERE, birds, fairytales and july being a very big month i’ve been told. Also my dreams are telling me signs, so ive researched all of it up and it said about spiritual awakening but it’s all tied in with my partner the signs. x
Also i have recently turned to buddhism which has transformed my life, which is why they suggested spiritual awakening x
Hi Emma
These days the veil between spirit and material reality is thinning out. The Consciousness link on the main menu across the page under the picture lists a few articles about such psychic signs.
Spiritual awakening can mean being aware of the divine flow in life. Part of this is noticing fortunate co-incidences. So how does one go with the flow? Part of the trick is getting absorbed in the ‘here and now’. This is similar to what they say in Buddhist circles about mindfulness. More information
Hi thanks for your reply Ed very useful, also wondered whether dream interpretaion actually can tell you what’s going to happen in your waking life?
The inner part of our psyche conveys the present trends in our fears, hopes, perceptions and where they can lead. The subconscious mind is talking about events which it, in effect, is bringing about inwardly. For example Swedenborg dreamed of dining with a priest and took away from the table two silver cups. These can be said to symbolize what he had learned about the spiritual life which he wished to give back to God represented by the priest. The dream was revealing something about his future role as a theologian. At that time he was far from knowing he would later produce 33 volumes of remarkable theology.
However I assume you are wondering about precognition. Swedenborg kept a diary of his dreams and two of these appear to have been predictive. About one he wrote “That which had been represented to me in a dream some days before happened to me; for in one day I was exposed to two deadly perils; this indeed happened to me…” The clinical psychologist Wilson Van Dusen wrote about this saying Swedenborg “unfortunately gives no other details. We would like to know what was shown in the dream and what the real life events were, and how closely they matched….Shortly thereafter he describes … how he saw the church of the Moravian Brethren in a dream three months before and recognized it when he came upon it in real life.”
In Van Dusen’s book The Presence of Other Worlds all the known examples of Swedenborg’s later precognitive powers are detailed.
Hi Ed, wondering if you could help me with the number 347 like I said previously 3′s have appeared everywhere now its 347 and I don’t know what the number really means or signifies in my life. Hope you can help thanks
Heron, I’m sorry that you are depressed. I am a Christian woman and I pray to Jesus for help. I also look touhrgh Psalms, which are beautiful and uplifting. If you don’t mind, I pray that the Lord will be the lifter of your head tonight, that He will give you peace and comfort, and that whatever is on your heart that burdens you, He will lift that burden and replace it with assurance of His love. And I ask this in Jesus name.
Hi Emma,
You have asked about the number 3 which was appearing a lot in your life and now about the number 347. Perfectly understandable questions as I do believe that nothing happens purely by chance. For this reason, I am not surprised that number symbolism constitutes a universal cultural phenomenon and people thinking and writing about it has gone on from time immemorial.
According to Swedenborg who wrote in the eighteenth century, numbers in much of the Bible have a spiritual significance because everything in sacred scripture is a divine revelation of what is universally true. They each express a particular psycho-spiritual state like a virtue or a vice. The number three is said to be generally about a complete state of what is true in a person or in its opposite sense of what is false.
The idea here is that what any number denotes depends on the context. Thus for example the divine command to ‘keep a feast unto the Lord three times a year” (Ex 23:14-17) signifies fullness and perpetuity of the worship of God from a grateful heart.
He also maintains that compound numbers which are multiples of a simple number signify similar things to the simple number but one that is more complex and extensive.
“It is bound to seem strange and very far-fetched to everybody that these details have this meaning. (However) people who possess the internal sense, as good spirits and angels do, are beyond anything earthly, bodily, or purely worldly, and so beyond anything involving numbers and measurements. Yet the Lord enables them to perceive the Word fully, and to do so quite independently from such concepts. This being so, it becomes quite clear that numbers and measurements embody celestial and spiritual things. The latter however are so remote from the sense of the letter that such things cannot possibly be seen.” (Heavenly Secrets section 647)
In addition to archetypes there is personal psychology to consider. Despite what I suggesting about universal meaning, the fact is it is you who is noticing the co-incidence of a specific number appearing in your life. I guess what this might signify may well have a unique meaning for yourself that unfortunately can only be better seen through you talking with someone who is able to draw out from you through association what is personally going on.
Hope things get clearer.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.
Cheers Stephen
Quick question,
I was on the phone with my best friend once, and my grandma asked me who I was talking to. I told her, “my best friend”, and her name. So grandma said, ” Tell her I love her! ” Immediately, my grandma caught the holy spirit and i dashed to catch her. This happens every single time she mentions her. What does this mean for my best friend ?
Hi SilverC. Thanks for your question.
I’m wondering what you understand by the term ‘the holy spirit’? I am comfortable with the idea that this is a powerful stream of God’s spiritual life flowing into my heart and mind, rather than any separate divine entity. I think it is a mistake to believe that God is a trinity of three persons. Instead it is easier for me to believe in a God with three aspects – like heart, head and hands — and the Holy Spirit is the third of these, acting with love and wisdom.
What made you think your grandma caught ‘the holy spirit’? And how does she know if she hasn’t caught something else?
Sometimes — perhaps too rarely — I feel caught up in the presence of this spirit which energises me, uplifting my feelings and inspiring my thoughts. I don’t suppose there is anything obvious about this to others. I don’t fall over and need catching but perhaps people are different.
Do you have any guess what this might mean for your best friend?
Can anyone else suggest anything?
I have been having some pretty amayzing things happening to me in the The Holy Spirit. I have some information that relays to the Exodus story of Aaron as a priest and was wondering if you could help me look over some of it and make sense of it?
Thank you for your time,
Cassi
Hi Cassi,
I just picked up on your post and so I don’t know if anyone has responded to you yet. I would be happy to explore this with you further if you wish? Could you be a bit more specific regarding which chapter and verse and how you relate this to what has been happening to you? Sounds very interesting!
Jack
Only last week I talked about my problems in dealing with life, I was allmost ready to give up and die.
I ordered a book called Observing Spirit,I am on to chapter 6 and have realised where I have been going wrong in my life.
Anyone having problems with life shuld read this book. It has inspired me and saved my life.
Hi Colin I’m sure it would be of interest to many readers if you could say what it is in Peter Rhode’s book that has shown you where you have been going wrong. Perhaps I should have let you finish reading the book before asking! Cheers Stephen
Where have I been going wrong.
I read the 10 commandments and did not realise how much I lusted after things. Wheather it was a nice car or a beutiful woman,I found it was the same feeling.
Just not feeling the feeling has changed my life, im more relaxed and live for the moment.
Doing the work when it is needed, and living my life again.
Its hard to explain,Im just starting my life again. Im learning everyday.
All I can say is have faith in god,and detatch yourself from bad feelings.
i am just thinking why i born here? as is there any main reason for this cycle where i become part of it? why i should ask god to help me out ? who i am? what is my relation with this earth? why my life is so limited if my ultimate destination is to die one day why i should seeking for something? what actually brings person out of pain , happiness, requirement ? what i can achieve so i can not have any other fulfillment ? what is this nature for if all have same right to live with me than how can i achieve that stage where i can not disturb others and as other can not disturb me?
Hi Hardik
Your comment reminds me of the sentiments expressed in the song What’s it all about Alfie. You’ve triggered me to put down some thoughts here which I hope you might find food for thought.
Regards Stephen
Hi,
I’m Fabio Odoardi, italian oboe player, I read on an italian edition of a book by Swedenborg called “Cielo ed Inferno” = “Heaven and Hell” that Swedenborg practiced a form of intuitive pranayama during his prayers and meditation, do you teach that?
I really would like to learn it!
All the best to you,
God bless you!
Fabio
Hi Fabio. Thanks for your question. No, I don’t teach Swedenborg’s method of breathing control. I do provide some information about it in my post How does breathing control help with meditation. On a practical level Yogayak has posted a short series of free videos about the practice of pranayama eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvdiMjSgItg which you might not have seen. Best regards Stephen