Is Playing Sports a Spiritual Activity?

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The answer is yes, very much so.  I have always been an ardent sports player all my life and I was glued to the television both during the Olympics and the Paralympics. What was so particularly  moving about the Paralympics was to see that that same urge for excellence and to be the best, is  equally present in people with disabilities.

It also enabled us, the spectators, to see physically disadvantaged people in a whole new light  and to no longer view them  as being ‘less’ than us. As such, it has allowed us, the able-bodied, to remove the projections  we often  put upon them, as somehow being less than us.

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Royalty Through the Emergence of Heart – The Royal Baby

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Royal Baby, William and Kate - Universal HeartWell the  Royal baby and third in line to the throne has arrived.

What kind of world is he emerging into?

Will England still need kings by the time he is ready to assume that responsibility?

Will any traditions be left?

In the 1970’s, Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock where he discussed how quickly the world was changing and suggested that many people were finding it hard to  keep up. Well, the rate of change has accelerated even more in the last forty years.

And are we keeping up? And what about the next  thirty years? Will things speed up even more?  How are we going to react? Will this accelerate our cognitive intelligence or stretch us beyond our capacities? Or both?

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Spiritual Maturity

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One of the things we need to remember is that we all have multiple intelligences and that different aspects of ourselves exist at different levels. Thus, we may be pretty evolved in one or two areas,  whereas in other arenas of our lives, we  may be less adept and  in some areas pretty hopeless.

Let us look, for example, at six aspects of life: our cognitive (intellectual) skills, our interpersonal skills (how adept we are at relating with others), our ‘street cred’ (how practical we are at handling the everyday nitty gritty challenges in life),  our emotional, moral and spiritual intelligence. Some of us may be highly skilled at a cognitive level (two Ph.D’s in astrophysics) but have absolutely no interpersonal or emotional skills. Someone might be very emotionally and cognitively skilled but have absolutely no moral sense, i.e., we are a total shit, and  we use our intelligence primarily to dupe and  manipulate others. (I can think of a couple of CEOs of large companies who fit into this category.)

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An Interview on Spiritual Activism

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Serge Beddington-Behrens Spiritual Activism

Question.

Serge, you have just written a book on Spiritual Activism and the emergence of the Global Heart. Let me start by asking you  a few questions. First, what do you mean by the global heart and why is it ‘awakening’ today, and how does it relate to spiritual activism? And secondly, how does spiritual activism differ from other forms of activism?

 
Serge. Good questions. I’ll  try to answer them in order. When I talk about the global or the universal heart, I am referring to the heart of humanity as a whole or the collective human heart which, if our own ‘personal’ hearts are sufficiently open, we can potentially link into or connect with.

We will know when we are connected or when the universal heart has stared awakening inside us, when we start feeling furious about the many huge injustices in the world or when we find ourselves minding what happens to people who live right at the other end of the world from us, or when we suddenly experience a mysterious love for our fellow human beings whom we’ve never met, or feel moved to commit to championing some cause where there is no direct, personal gain to ourselves.

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A Message of Hope

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Crisis = Dangerous OpportunityNight, it has been said, is always at its darkest just before dawn and if we were to apply that image to what is currently happening in our world  (the dire situation in Syria, the horrendous scenario in Egypt, Iran going nuclear, our global financial problems, the problems of  youth unemployment, the environment – my list can go on for ever), we can say that, species wise,  we are definitely in the middle of a dark night.

And the problem about dark nights, which is well known to anyone going through the early stages of  a ‘dark night of the soul crisis’, is that when immersed in them, it  often seems as if there is no way out and that the forces of darkness truly have the upper hand.

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Does Evil Exist and If So What Should We Do About It?

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Question: ‘Serge, do you believe in the reality of evil? Do you think it exists? if so, what should we do about it?

Serge: I do believe in evil, yes, and certainly feel that if we are to have a better world  that we should  understand  it and, if we feel strong enough,  confront it and not bury our heads, ostrich-like, and pretend it is not there. You know that old saying about evil being allowed when good people do nothing.  Well, it’s true! However, if we are to ‘do anything’ about evil, we need to recognise its many different faces. The way I see it is that there are two kinds of evil: obvious evil and non-obvious evil. Obvious evil is, well, obvious.  It is about Hitler, Robert Mugabe, Darfur, Stalin, Genocide, Auschwitz, murder, torture, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Etc. Continue reading →

There is so much Financial Unrest in the World at this time. What do you think will happen?

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Question:  Serge, I am scared about what is happening in the world today. Trillions are being thrown into our coffers which will put our nation in debt for years to come; yet nothing seems to be getting better. George Soros, the great financial guru, believes England may need to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund and that if the G 12 summit does not work out, that the world will go into a depression.  This is terrible. What the hell is happening?  I see nothing good about these times. What do you have to say about  all this? Continue reading →

Exploring Eighteen Fundamental Principles to Living the Spiritual Life

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The Spirituality that I embrace, centers around recognizing the importance of the following eighteen points. If interested, it is important you read them carefully to see if what I offer, corresponds to what you feel you need. Here are my points:

Eighteen principles of Spirituality
  1. There are many paths to God and each of us, according to our culture and soul inclination, needs to find a way that works for us.
  2. We may discover our Spirituality without necessarily being a member of any particular Religion.
  3. Divinity is both transcendent and immanent, and thus exists both beyond all things, while at the same time is present within all things. Continue reading →

The Challenge of the Spiritual Path – Celebration of the Quest

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SBB. Today, I would like to explore some of the general challenges that a person may encounter if they make a commitment to following a spiritual path and seek to live a spiritual life. I am not going to be specific and deal with the many different kinds of individual problems that the seeker can face. In other words, I am not going to look specifically at spiritual emergencies or go into detail over the many different kinds of trap which can beset the seeker, especially as he advances along his path. This is the subject of a further dialogue. Here, my focus will simply be on what it means to embrace spirituality in an essentially secular culture and what the spiritual journey means and what it might be asking of us. Continue reading →

The Emergence of People Power in the East

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What do you feel about the emergence of people Power in the Middle East?……… Do you feel hopeful for our future?

‘We seem to be seeing a strong impulse for freedom springing up in the world today – especially in the Middle East, with all the manifestations of ‘people power’ that we have been witnessing, especially with what has just been going on in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain and now Libya . Do you have hope that a better world is in the offing? If so, what do you think of those prophecies that foretell the end of the world in 2012? Doesn’t that sound rather scary?’ Continue reading →