We need to put ourselves in the disposition to understand it. We're not going to understand it at all if we stand there, resistant to the idea, and waiting for it to sort of turn up as something credible to us. We can't really say what they are at all. So spirituality is often about not knowing, because knowing means you've got it wrong. It can't be defined. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable. And what goes missing is — meaning, and value for the subject.
And in ritual we see embodied metaphor. Sometimes things can speak very loud to us through rituals, through a mythos which is not a fiction, but is just another kind of truth from logos that one arrives at by sequential reasoning. Metaphor is a way to deal with the apophatic. So how are we to approach this? I'd like just to make some attempt before I close.
One is to take the idea of depth, which I've mentioned once or twice. Nevertheless it is one of the most important categories we use. Although I attempt to describe what profundity consists in, as soon as I speak, it becomes quite clear that no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say, I always have to leave three dots at the end.
I am forced to use language which is, in principle, not only today, but forever, inadequate for its purpose. You have no formula that will by deduction lead you to all the vistas opened by profound sayings.
In this way it is something like the sublime, except, instead of the sublime without, it is the sublime within. And these two things surely correspond to one another, which is why we feel our soul, as we say, expands in the sublime landscape, the vastness of the view speaks to us internally. And sometimes we encounter this also in more mundane aspects, if you like, of life, or, at least, more familiar aspects of life, such as our life of love, and through those that we love.
In fact, in a secular age one of the ways in which we can really understand that there is something beyond, that we call the soul, may be through eros at its finest, at its greatest. Jung, again interpreted by Hillman, says that this is what makes meaning possible, and deepens events into experience, deepens them into experiences; no longer just events, but experiences, which are communicated in love. In other words they are stressed , although they report happiness.
And the tension, again, which makes the world what it is, is an aspect of consciousness, not a function of it. Bonheoffer calls it a kind of cantus firmus , using an idea from polyphonic music: the melody, as it were, to which all the other melodies provide the counterpoint.
And he makes the point that, if that element in our life, the spiritual, is kept going as the cantus firmus , we can depart as far as we like from it into the world, the actual world, the concrete world, the material, the fleshly, the emotional, the everyday — without losing anything. So, finally, I'm talking very much about the soul in general.
But what about each of our individual souls? How do we square the idea of soul as something generic and yet something particular? Research reveals we have three separate neural pathway networks, leading to the head, the gut and the heart. These have been dubbed the three brains, all capable of controlling how we feel and how we react. We need to look after our mental health to maintain focus and clarity of the mind.
Not to mention the need to monitor what we put into our body and how we use it to ensure physical wellbeing. If our physical health is sound but our mental or spiritual wellbeing is not, our physical health will eventually be impacted by the affects of reduced motivation, low morale, decreased satisfaction and lack of purpose.
Likewise, poor physical health affects our personal satisfaction, contentment and mental state. We all know what we should be doing to look after our bodies — eat less and move more. Focusing on nourishing the mind and our mental health can improve our focus, relationships, outlook and more. Spiritual health is more than religion or new age beliefs.
It involves identifying our purpose and direction, recognising what brings us joy and understanding how to find contentment in our lives. Here are some suggestions to improve the health and wellbeing of your soul. Hunterlink supports organisations to improve the overall health and wellbeing of their workforce, delivering a range of organisational and individual benefits.
Contact our team today to discover how our programs, workshops and training can help unlock the true potential of your workforce. The pressure of juggling the competing responsibilities of work and home can be immense, often leading to a situation where health and wellbeing take a back seat.
Managing work-life […]. There are many reasons why so many of us get derailed when setting goals. Although the word Soul is not directly used in the Bible as a synonym for God, it was revealed to Mary Baker Eddy through her search of the Scriptures that in its highest significance Soul is God, Spirit. And she so uses it in her revelation of the Science of being. Soul signifies divine consciousness and is manifested in the spiritual idea of God, His reflection, man.
God being divine consciousness and Soul being God and infinite, nothing exists outside of Soul's infinitude, nothing is separate from its harmony, beauty, and perfection.
This is implied in the Messianic prophecy quoted in Matthew , "Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased. When the writer first took up the study of Christian Science she readily understood that the opposite of Spirit is so-called matter, the opposite of Mind is mortal mind, the opposite of Love is hatred, the opposite of Life is death, the opposite of Truth is error, and the opposite of Principle is chaos.
But what is the opposite of Soul? After reading what our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" p. She also realized that Soul-sense is that which reveals man as spiritual, as perfect, Godlike, whole, complete; that it is never cognizant of the five material senses, though false belief would attempt to identify man with them; that material sense is the counterfeit of spiritual sense.
Man is seen in Science to be the reflection of the one infinite Being in its reality and eternality. He has an indestructible, immutable, harmonious existence inseparable from his creator, the one cause. As the expression of Spirit, Soul, the one divine consciousness, man is spiritual, individual consciousness, the reflection of Mind. He is the emanation of God, the embodiment of the concord and loveliness of Soul.
As the individual manifests the attributes of Soul, such as truthfulness, orderliness, freedom, wisdom, spiritual seeing and hearing, health, and harmony, he identifies himself as the very evidence of God's being. Holding to this conception of man, he demonstrates the qualities of man as Soul's expression. Too much cannot be said about the magnitude of the import of our acceptance of a true spiritual selfhood.
One who had been suffering for some time from a severe physical condition, and who was almost in despair, said to her sister: "I am at last ready to have treatment in Christian Science. Please call a practitioner for me. The difficulty was met immediately. Also, a growth which had held her in bondage for over three years fell away in the night.
Still, by the end of the first millennium, there was a recognition that most of us had not been sufficiently good to merit immediate happiness, nor sufficiently evil to merit eternal misery. Catholicism thus developed an intermediate state — purgatory — offering the slightly or moderately wicked a chance to be purified of their sins.
All souls will be reunited with their resurrected bodies on Judgement Day when Christ returns and God finally confirms their destiny. Judaism remains uncertain about the consciousness of the dead in the afterlife, although the dominant view holds that, after death, the soul will be in a conscious state.
Orthodox Judaism is committed to the idea of the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day and its reunion with the soul, together with heavenly bliss for the saved. Liberal forms of modern Judaism, like modern liberal Christianity, sit lightly on the idea of the resurrection of the body and emphasise spiritual life immediately after death.
Within Islam, souls await the day of resurrection in their graves. It is a limbo-like state: those destined for hell will suffer in their graves; those destined for heaven will wait peacefully. On the final Day of Judgement, Muslims believe the wicked will suffer torments in hell.
The righteous will enjoy the pleasures of Paradise. In the modern West, reincarnation has a positive flavour as a desirable alternative to the traditional Western afterlife. But the Indian traditions all agree it is the ultimate horror — their aim is to escape from it. They do, however, differ radically in their views of the destiny of the soul beyond the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
Within Hinduism, we can distinguish four different schools of thought on this. In the first of these, known as Samkhya-Yoga , the aim is to realise the essential separateness of the soul from its material body, thus enabling us to live in the here and now without attachment to the things of the world.
At death, the liberated soul will exist eternally beyond any further entanglements with the world. Modern Western postural yoga derives from this, although it is intended, not so much to remove us from the world, as to enable us the better to function within it.
This is the dominant philosophy underlying the Hare Krishna movement and of all the Indian traditions, most closely resembles Christianity.
0コメント