Sparks from the Fire

I’m not particularly big on the word “religion”.  I find it to be oft times restrictive, non-inclusive and all too often divisive.  Though I have studied the world’s religions all my life, it’s not a field that I find myself associating with very often.  When anyone asks me if I am a religious person I often answer, “not particularly, but I am a spiritual seeker.”

There’s probably no greater cause of war throughout history than religious differences.  The only thing that comes close to it is greed.  I choose to stay as far away from the human element of religion in my spiritual practice, which, of course, is rather impossible, but, for me, preferable.  We humans (and I count myself as one) have confused the study of God, consciousness, reality, our world, matter, thought, spirit and the universe by dividing into groups and along the way, shutting doors and windows to alternative thought in an effort to protect our own.

It strikes me that religions often are more limiting than creative.  They often force the thinker into a box and essentially say, “think this, study this, here is the only truth – shut the rest out.”

If there is anything that I’ve learned in my life’s study of spirituality, it’s that nobody has a corner on truth.  Truth is truth.  Everybody has access to it. Every religion I’ve ever studied captured and illuminated much truth for me.  The only thing that really ever got in my way was the differences in language or the various definitions of words that are tossed about.  Most religious differences I’ve found to be based on a confusion of semantics.

So I choose to call myself first a spiritual seeker rather than a religious person.  I hope this does not offend you as I approach the writing of this post with the objective of unifying thought as opposed to dividing it.

Wikipedia states, “A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge.  In a more restricted sense a scientist is an individual who uses a scientific method.  The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science…  Some perform research toward a more comprehensive understanding of nature, including physical, mathematical and social realms…  This is distinct from philosophers, those who use logic toward more comprehensive understanding of intangible aspects of reality that lack a direct connection to nature, focusing on the realm of thought itself.”

If we’re to accept these definitions put forth by Wikipedia, then I suppose I’m sort of a scientist/philosopher, a combination of both.  I do engage in a “systematic activity to acquire knowledge” and also I do “use logic toward more comprehensive understanding of intangible aspects of reality…, focusing on the realm of thought itself.”

All said and done, I prefer the word “scientist”.  I find spirit to be actually quite tangible the more I study it and matter to be less and less the reality.  So I call myself a spiritual scientist. (more…)

The dictionary defines this in simple terms.  “Someone who denies the existence of God”.  It’s from the Latin: atheos which means ‘without God’ or ‘Godless’.

I’ve always been curious to meet an atheist.  Whenever someone announces themselves as one, I always try to take a moment (or often many more) and discus their atheism with them.  I like to first start with the obvious question, “Define God?”

I’ve had this opportunity 15-20 times in life and it’s always been the same experience.  Once they’ve explained their definition of God to me, I’ve always found myself saying back to them the same line: “Well then, I must be an atheist too because I don’t believe in that god either.”

Often the definition portrayed is archaic, anthropomorphic, and usually something taught them by confused parents or Sunday School teachers, but always ideas that I find equally hard to swallow.

Can this be the most misunderstood word in the human language?  Quite possibly so.  I’m not here to rectify that.  I have had an evolving, ever-changing struggle with the concept of God for over a half a century now.  I’m not at all sure what God is, but I do have a feeling for what He, She or It is not.

A guy in the sky with a long white beard?  No.  A He or a She?  No.  A Father/ Mother?  Sort of…  An infinite and eternal concept?  Probably.  Love, Life, Truth, Being, Interconnection?  Yes. (more…)

Note: The following is a compilation of several posts and some new updates intended for newer readers of this blog.  Much has been written about our new project, Goin’ Home.  If you’ve been following all along, you may find some redundancies here; however, if you’re somewhat new to the project, you’ll find here a summary of events and thoughts that will bring you somewhat up to date.

What if today you could go over to your neighborhood grocery, grab that cart and shop for anything your little ol’ heart desired, then, instead of getting into the checkout line, skip that and just head home with your groceries – steak, shrimp, Haagen Daz, throw in a little Kobe Beef, some chocolate truffles and perchance a tin or two of Almas Caviar.

When you got outside with your overflowing shopping cart, the police would be there, but would just look the other way as you passed by chuckling gleefully, licking your chops.

What a great idea!  Why don’t we do this?  Food should be free!  I think most of us would agree that life would be a lot easier if food were free.

Trouble is, after very little time, maybe the next time we went back to the supermarket, the aisles would be empty, the shelves bare.  “Hey, all the food is gone!” you might cry.  “Well, let’s go back to the farmers and get more,” the store manager would say.

So we’d go to the farmers and say, “Hey farmers, make more food!”  They would respond like this:  “Without getting paid, it’s just too hard.  Sorry, but there’s just no more food.  We’re gonna go do something else.”

Well, essentially that’s what just happened to the music business – except for one problem.  Of course the farmers equal the artists in this little analogy and the artists, who love to make music, are still saying, “Oh cool, you like my music? You actually want to listen to my music?  OK, I’ll give it to you for free!”

So it’s gonna take a little time before this situation is righted.  Give the starving artists a chance to really starve.   Then they won’t be able to make any more music no matter how much they love to do it.  Cuz we all gotta eat! (more…)

Life Lesson for a Pole-Vaulter

Tonight I shall forego my usual thoughts on Inspirational music and concentrate instead on a great lesson learned decades ago by a young man out on his own in the world for the first time and struggling with life’s many temptations.  I shall kid you not and tell you right from the beginning of this tale that the young man in question was I.  The tale is true.

I was a sophomore in college and at spring break, when all my friends went off either skiing in Colorado or partying in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, I, of pole-vaulter fame, went off instead to get a jump on the track season and practice my skills at the University of Illinois.

I had gone to the University of Virginia my freshman year on a track and soccer scholarship where I had tutored under a great college pole-vault coach by the name of Lou Onesty (interestingly enough pronounced like the word “Honesty”).  As a pole-vaulter it had been a wise decision to learn under this man, for he had been the first true pole-vaulting coach I had ever worked under and I had added a full two feet to my best height that previous freshman year.

Trouble was, though I was thrilled with my progress as a pole-vaulter, I was otherwise pretty miserable at UVA and decided to transfer to a small college in Illinois named Principia College where many of my friends attended.

These were difficult times for pole-vaulters.  “Why”, you must ask?  Because literally three years before, at the end of my high-school experience, the pole-vault world had switched from Swedish steal poles to the new and much improved fiber-glass poles and the world records had shot up as never before.  Now, vaulters, instead of muscling up a stiff steel pole, had to learn how to be catapulted by a flexing fiber-glass pole through the air to greater heights than ever before.

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I’ve been working on loving more.  It makes me a bit uneasy just to say it.  I mean, why should I have to ‘work’ to do that?  I’m sorry to have to say it.  I know it should come more naturally – to love more – but I just went through a pretty terrific healing and one of the things I identified in my negative thinking as I worked to clean it up was that I simply needed to love more.  Love people, love what I do, love God – more.

Much of what I do is easy to love.  I live for the moments every day when I can be creative and I’m fortunate that my life seems to bring me those opportunities daily.  However, some of what I do, like everybody else, is just drudgery.  I battle through it running headlong to what I love.  I’ve learned not to put the drudgery off, but to tackle it ASAP so I can go about the things I love with freedom.

So I’ve been working more on loving the drudgery.  Or rather taking the drudgery out of the activity and going about the supposedly non-creative stuff more creatively.  To a certain extent it’s working.  I’m happier and I have less drudgery.

I’ve been working on loving people more.  This has been my most successful endeavor in this exercise because I’ve simply decided to button my lip as much as I can when I don’t have something good to say about someone.  I’ve stopped rehearsing my complaints as much and that has enabled me to spend more time on what’s right or what’s good about someone and see them in a positive light.  It too is working.

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One of my favorite things to contemplate is a statement by one of my heroes, Albert Einstein, who said that something isn’t there and so we see it, but rather, we see it and so it is there.  This got me to thinking.  I realized that he was really saying that as we think it, it appears.

So we create our world in our minds.  This goes for the physical world as well as our imaginative world.  And on second thought, this goes for each of us as well.

I’ve always found this to be a pretty mind-boggling concept, but not really when one considers the world of our dreams.  When in that mental state, the world around us seems as real as the world around us in our waking state.  Then there’s the awakened state that most spiritual leaders often speak of – that which we are working to attain in this life on Planet Earth.  Three states of thinking: Dreams, Waking and Awakened.

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” – Plato

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Yesterday, while doing my duties as Creative Director of Watchfire Music and reviewing new album submissions, I’ll have to admit I got a bit off course and unconnected with the pure idea of Inspirational music for a moment when I was reading the liner notes of a new submission.

The artist wrote, “May our God El Shaddai, who through divine providence gives them a compassionate heart…” and I got stopped on that and asked the Missus, “Is ‘El Shaddai’ from the Bible?”  Her answer was, of course, “Yes” and I’m now somewhat embarrassed to say that inwardly I breathed a small sigh of relief and went on reading because now this guy was “OK”.  He wasn’t some sort of a nut.

Inner bells went off, gongs gonged, sirens wailed and I stopped my reading again and thought about the trap I had just fallen into.  “Who cares what he calls God?” I thought.  The guy was from Nigeria.  In the Yoruban language of Nigeria God, the Supreme Being is called Olodumare.  In French He’s called Dieu.  In German, Gott.  In Russian, ???.  And, of course, in Mandarin Chineese, ? (Shén).

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