Category: Spirituality

What Is The Antidote To Boredom?

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Boredom

Boredom

Boredom is never a description of reality, but a description of a state of mind superimposed upon reality. Boredom is often a surrender of sensitivity, clouding our capacity to see, listen to, and touch each moment as if we have never encountered it before.

Solution

The antidote to boredom is not more sounds, sensations, and experiences, but recovering our capacity to see anew each moment. The world we think we know, the people we think know, the sights and sounds we have encountered countless times before, come alive in new ways each moment we give them our wholehearted attention.

Buddhist Path to Simplicity
The Buddhist Path to Simplicity
Christina Feldman

What Are The Benefits Of Mindfulness?

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Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the basis for transforming ourselves and creating a more harmonious family and society. It is the miracle that allows us to become fully alive in each moment. The deepest fruit of mindfulness practice is the realization that peace and joy are available, within us and around us, right here and right now. This is something we can taste, and we can offer it to everyone we meet and everyone we love.

Thich Nhat Hanh 

Practicing Mindfulness
Practicing Mindfulness
Jerry Braza

How Are Religion & Spirituality Related?

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Religion and Spirituality

In Service to Each Other

Religion and spirituality are not at cross-purposes, rather they serve each other. If at any point one’s religious life is not in service to one’s spiritual growth, then religion has lost its way. Similarly, if a spiritual path leads one away from love, kindness, and responsibility to the greater good, then the spiritual adventure has gone awry.

The Seeker's Guide
The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life A Spiritual Adventure
Elizabeth Lesser

What Makes A Classic?

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Classics

Qualities of Classics

Classic describes moments when the human mind peaks in its grasp of the true, the good, and the beautiful. There is no canonical agreement of what makes a classic a classic. However, there do seem to be certain qualities without which the term classic would seem a compliment misapplied:

  • Excellence
    The excellence of a classic is such that it seems to enjoy an inexhaustibility of meaning. The opposite of a classic is a period piece, fad, momentary, or provincial thing with glitzy celebrity.
  • Universality
    Classics melt borders geographically and temporally. Classics are as at home today as they were yesterday – and maybe even more so today as new developments make their insights even more relevant and more obviously true.
  • Shock
    Classics jostle how we see the world. Classics are subverse of petty and sectarian orthodoxies and ideologies. In a classic, the might be triumphs over the grip of the status quo.
  • Hope
    Hope follows like a corollary to excellence, universality, and shock. Hope has universal appeal and opens previously unexpected horizons. Hope enlarges our sense of possibility and invites participation.
  • Fruitfulness
    Classics are fruitful in two ways: they spawn other classics, and over time, more is found in them than was even suspected by the original authors. Classics are perennials that rise to new life with each new opportunity. Millennia later their insights may be vindicated as they could not have been when first created. In the presence of a classic, standards rise and thus critical thought is encouraged.

Christianity Without God
Christianity Without God: Moving beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative
Daniel C. Maguire