+ I am glad you are here and I hope you will continue to share this Amazing Journey with me and others.
+ I have previously offered a lot of what I intend to offer in this series of posts in a variety of ways. Hopefully this series of posts will lead to a book, the book I have promised to write and publish for at least the last 2 decades. You can find the basic ideas at Abundancetrek.com where you will find links to my blogs and to a few recommended websites on the home page. Also on the home page are some of the basic ideas I have pur forth for THE NEW FAITH FOR THE NEW EARTH. On that home page are links to the nine Heavenly Attributes and the four essential Spiritual Journeys: Mind, Heart, Body and Soul.
+ I have long believed that humanity needs to move beyond the narrow confines of particular cultural and religious associations. In the past couple of decades I have found more and more people who share this belief and many of us now identify as InterSpiritual. In my experience the InterSpiritual community goes deeper into sharing wisdom and practicing contemplation methods than does InterFaith or MultiFaith communities. I hsve nothing against such communities. They often do a lot of good I participate enthusiastically in the InterFaith Coaltion of Greater Utica.
But if humanity is now moving into a great evolutionary leap forward and I believe we are, then we simply must share the wisdom and practices of the great variety of communities of faith far more than we have in our history so far. It must be a sharing of great respect for wisdom and practices from new and different places.
This is not easy. Devotion to a disciplined spirituality of any kind takes practice for many years. Too many people today are finding little bits of wisdom and practices without appreciating or understanding their true meaning. I urge you to discover wisdom and practices from other places but not without going deep into their meaning and purpose.
There are many InterSpiritual pioneers. Some of them are ancient teachers of profound wisdom and practices who I will probably name in future posts. In recent years there have been a few who stand out including Thomas Merton and Wayne Teasdale. Both of these men were Christian monks who became fascinated with the monastic traditions of other faiths. Brother Wayne Teasdale even became a Hindu monk as well as a Christian monk. He is the one who coined the term InterSpiritual and wrote several books which are InterSpiritual classics including The Mystic Heart, A Monk in the World and The Mystic Hours.
Brother Wayne Teasdale offered some amazing wisdom which I think can benefit all of humanity immensely. He longed for us to build a new InterSpiritual community which he hoped would make it possible for us to share our "mystic heart." In The Mystic Heart he wrote:
Humanity stands at a crossroads between horror and hope. In choosing hope, we must seed a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to life drawing its inspiration from perennial spiritual and moral insights, intuition and experience. We call this new awareness interspiritual, implying not the homogenization of religion, but the recovering of the shared mystic heart beating in the center of the world’s deepest spiritual traditions.
He called for us to recognize the "the real religion of humankind" and he said he wants this to become "the religion of the third millennium." In The Mystic Heart he wrote:
The real religion of humankind can be said to be spirituality itself, because mystical spirituality is the origin of all the world religions. If this is so, and I believe it is, we might also say that inter-spirituality – the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions – is the religion of the third millennium.
No comments:
Post a Comment