Posted by Sara on March 27, 2000 at 10:52:13:
In Reply to: I want everyone's opinions on this post... posted by Tiggy on March 26, 2000 at 17:41:33:
Seems lika a common New Age message to me. Where is Jesus in all this?
Sara
: We have bodies and personalities, and behind both of those lies spirit. This spirit
: is eternal and exists everywhere in all people. It also exists in other living
: creatures and in matter even at a cellular level, but in these it exists in an
: unconscious way. They are created things which act unconsciously. Man
: however has the capacity to be conscious of this spiritual part of him/herself and
: generally has been until the modern age where we have little recourse to ideas of
: the transcendent or the sacred.
: Religions of course are evolutionary, yet they all and always stress this
: transcendent aspect of man, and provide ways in which s/he can come to know
: that part of themselves, the still centre, which is spirit. All religions identify and
: attest to the existence in man of such a spirit which is also identified with God or
: the Divine Essence. It is stressed in religious philosopy that this spirit is Real, ie.
: that it has Being and autonomous existence, in a way that man living solely by his
: own personality cannot have being. This is not to say that our personalities are
: bad things, they can aid us in coming to the spirit, but we need to be centred in
: the spirit in order for our personalities to be harmonious and for us to be happy
: and have 'the peace that passes understanding'. Cut off from spirit, our
: personalities are full of strife and discontent, but centred in spirit, they become
: redeemed or transformed and become as they should be, part of an undivided
: whole. They are reunited with the source of their existence and made real.
: Religious thinkers have found and suggested a variety of ways that we can work
: towards this uniting with spirit, but have also stressed that it is the work of grace,
: ie. that spirit is all the time trying to fill us with its presence, but that we can
: co-operate more or less with that as we feel inclined. No religion has clarified the
: ways to unite with spirit more than Hinduism which has posited an number of
: different ways or forms of yoga. These are, the way of meditation, the way of
: action, and the way of love. Hindu writers have also made very clear the
: identification of our individual spirit (Atman) and the transcendent, omnipresent
: spirit, (Brahman). You may be wondering if this Spirit is personal or impersonal,
: but the spirit transcends such categories. It contains all things and all things come
: from it, so that of course the personal as we understand it is contained in it, yet it
: also totally transcends the personal as we understand it. In the same way it is
: Good and Loving, yet transcends goodness and love as we are able to
: understand it. We can never fully comprehend that Spirit, yet we can know it,
: not by seeing it as an object would be seen and known about, but by realising it
: in ourselves - a knowing through experience. We all recognise spirit in things that
: are beautiful and good and true and have the capacity to respond to those things
: and focus on them and this can help us to get a sense of that spirit which in itself
: is much harder to convey than to experience.