Calmness Within
When we have a balanced inner life we learn to understand ourselves. Recognizing our faults but not judging with our usual intensity will relax and open our heart, which then lets wisdom and compassion be how we react to the people and situations that affect us.
Instead of anger or jealousy, insight and loving kindness can become the way for us, our default mode. This leads to creating a deep calmness within.
Being Buddha-ish
Sharon Cormier
Solitary Withdrawal
Periods of solitary withdrawal from society are common to diverse religious traditions. Such periods mark the lives of many great saints and religious founders. Examples include Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness, Buddha’s solitary meditation, and Mohammed’s isolation in a cave. Such practices have also been part of the training of Eskimo shamans, the Christian desert fathers, Hindu yogis, and Tibetan monks who may be walled up in caves for up to 13 years.
Reasons for Seeking Solitude
The reason for seeking solitude is essentially to allow attention to be redirected away from the distractions of the world and toward the spiritual. The spiritual realm is ultimately found to reside within the seeker, but to find it requires intense contemplation and introspection. Concentration must be cultivated, sensitivity to one’s inner world deepened, the mind quieted, and the clamour of competing desires stilled.
Inner Knowing
Helen Palmer, Editor
In the new world view, the universe is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties of any part of this web is fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their mutual interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.
Fritjof Capra
Looking to Nature
Todd Macalister
Living & Dying
Zen doesn’t look for immortality of the soul or eternal life in the Pure Land. Life and death are not two separate things, and we aren’t moving from life to death to perpetual life. Instead, we are living and at the same time dying. At every moment we are all life and all death. Our life is not a movement toward death but a continual process of living and dying.
Eternity
Today doesn’t bring us closer to eternity, because today, at this moment, eternity is completely manifesting itself. We are experiencing eternity today.
Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit
Robert Kennedy
Process Thought
Process Thought is a systematic approach to the world, to life, and to humanity that seeks to integrate what we know and what we feel into a single united narrative of interrelationship and becoming. Building upon the insight that the world is dynamic and interrelated, Process Thought articulates that every creature exists in relationship to each other and to all creation, and that everything is always becoming and self-determining within the parameters of what has gone before and what is being determined by the rest of existence.
Process Thought is a response to the challenge posed by the dynamic and interrelated nature of reality — making sense of what exists, given our knowledge of relativity theory, quantum physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and neurology, psychology, history, religion, and literature.
Process Theology
Within Process Philosophy, clergy and philosophical theologians have applied these insights to the questions raised by religion, and in Process Theology they advanced tremendous possibilities for a faithfulness that is honest, open, spiritually rich, and ethically engaged in the world. Rather than enforcing a strict division of natural and supernatural, Process Theology affirms that we live in a universe that is a single integrated reality. Everything is in dynamic relationship with everything else.
God & Us Together
God is not timeless and separate from creation. God is the One who offers us the best possible options for our own future and who lures us to attain the divine goals of maximal relationship, engagement, love, compassion, and justice. God uses persuasive, persistent power to allow us to intuit the optimal choice for each of us and empowers us to be able to make that choice, should we so choose. And, God works in and through creation to respond affirmatively to the divine lure uniquely appropriate to it at that precise moment. God does not break the rules, but works to create a cosmos in which flourishing is possible.
God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
Who Knows Anyhow? 