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Dignity
/ˈdignitē/ noun
1. The moment you realize that the person you cared for has nothing intellectually or spiritually to offer you, but a headache.
2. The moment you realize God had greater plans for you that don’t involve crying at night or sad Pinterest quotes.
3. The moment you stop comparing yourself to others because it undermines your worth, education and your parent’s wisdom.
4. The moment you live your dreams, not because of what it will prove or get you, but because that is all you want to do. People’s opinions don’t matter.
5. The moment you realize that no one is your enemy, except yourself.
6. The moment you realize that you can have everything you want in life. However, it takes timing, the right heart, the right actions, the right passion and a willingness to risk it all. If it is not yours, it is because you really didn’t want it, need it or God prevented it.
7. The moment you realize the ghost of your ancestors stood between you and the person you loved. They really don't want you mucking up the family line with someone that acts anything less than honorable.
8. The moment you realize that happiness was never about getting a person. They are only a helpmate towards achieving your life mission.
9. The moment you believe that love is not about losing or winning. It is just a few moments in time, followed by an eternity of situations to grow from.
10. The moment you realize that you were always the right person. Only ignorant people walk away from greatness.
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Shannon L. Alder
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The fire on the mountain.” That was Anna. “Alchemy,” she said. “I feel it singing in my bones.”
“Singing?” Mary would never understand Anna. The young woman turned away.
Wiseman’s reply was tinged with respect.
“That great pair of alchemists, Francis Ransome and Roberta Le More, believed the work they did affected the world’s spirit, the anima mundi. The Native Americans they met believed they too could and should interact with the Great Spirit. They lived with reverence for the land and all its peoples, the ancestors, the animals, the rocks, the trees, mountains.”
Mary’s jaw dropped; Caroline glowed; Anna pretended not to listen. Wiseman nodded, then continued.
“You mean…?” began Mary.
“Yes, it could have been so different, a meeting of like-minded earth-based spiritualities. Just imagine, what could have been?
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Susan Rowland (The Alchemy Fire Murder (Mary Wandwalker #2))
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Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
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Linda Hogan (Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World)
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When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves...sometimes even physically.
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Raquel Cepeda (Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina)
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Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
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Raquel Cepeda (Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina)
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It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
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William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)
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Though we have rightly applauded our ancestors for their spiritual achievements (and do not and must not discount them now), those of us who prevail today will have done no small thing. The special spirits who have been reserved to live in this time of challenges and who overcome will one day be praised for their stamina by those who pulled handcarts.
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Neal A. Maxwell
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There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man...there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.
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Anthon St. Maarten (Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny)
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I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition.
...
When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. ... Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, Living Christ)
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Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.
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Marija Gimbutas
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When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here!
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Stanley Victor Paskavich
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The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.
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Gustav Meyrink (The Golem)
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When you find yourself in one of those mystical/devotional frames of mind or in am emergency and you feel you want to pray, then pray. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray or feel prevented by thinking yourself unworthy in any way. Fact is whatever terrible thing you may have done, praying will always turn your energy around for the better.
Pray to whomever, whatever, and whenever you choose. Pray to the mountain, pray to the ancestors, pray to the Earth, pray to the Tao (but it won’t listen!), pray to the Great Mother, pray to Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Lakshmi, Siva, pray to the Great Spirit, it makes no difference. Praying is merely a device for realigning the mind, energy, and passion of your local self with the mind, energy and passion of your universal self. When you pray, you are praying to the god or goddess within you. This has an effect on your energy field, which in turn translates into a positive charge that makes something good happen.
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Stephen Russell (Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior)
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But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.
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Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
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Let your heart sing from those wounded places.
When you sing your song with everything you've got,
it will not only heal you, but it will heal all of us through you.
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Gemma B. Benton (Then She Sang A Willow Song: Reclaiming Life and Power with the Ancestors)
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More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.
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Raquel Cepeda (Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina)
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Our cultural roots are the most ancient in the world. The spiritual concepts of our Ancestors gave birth to religious thought African people believe in the oneness of the African family through sacred time, which unites the past, the present and the future. Our Ancestors live with us.
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Marimba Ani
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When two sides who consider each other enemies converge in armed struggle, for the moment they are no longer enemies. They are fellow human beings who face the same two choices that their ancestors did for centuries before them: to destroy each other or to prosper together.
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Thomas Cuong Huynh (The Art of War—Spirituality for Conflict: Annotated & Explained)
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Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence."
He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names.
"Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal."
Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it.
I remember a different whipping.
"Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!"
There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy.
"Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not.
It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.
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Pierce Brown (Red Rising (Red Rising Saga, #1))
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All of our ancestors live within each one of us whether we are aware of it or not.
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Laurence Overmire
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John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body....
Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them.
Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
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Linda Hogan (Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World)
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Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.
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Philip Zaleski (The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams)
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Everyone, no matter what their cultural background, has a right to discover the sacred in nature; to heal and be redeemed spiritually by nature; and to revere the ancestors. We are all haunted and saved by our memories.
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Martha Brooks (Bone Dance)
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Our Ancestors came to Australia, foraged for food in a rain forest where AM grew, ate the AM, and suffered the effects of muscimol hallucinations in a cave and drew paintings of a religious nature and these paintings were confirmed at 50,000 years ago, at the exact inception of religion. This was done by a species that never had religion before that. Since the species would therefore have no religious content until they ate the hallucinogens, it follows that these AM were the start of religion.
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Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
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Each star twinkles with its own energy it holds within. Human’s energy is hidden deep in their soul. My ancestors said that when your soul burns bright, you twinkle just like the star... your eyes twinkle just like the stars...
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Tamuna Tsertsvadze (Asashin)
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When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, Living Christ)
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Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours.
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Daniel Quinn
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Anyone - your daddy or mine, your ancestor or mine, your god or mine - who bays for blood of "infidels" is an a***ole. And non-divine.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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The fires of our ancestors burn within our very bodies now.
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Jessica Marie Baumgartner (The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice)
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What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today's mediated frenzy.
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Bruce Sterling (The Dead Media Notebook)
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We are our ancestors. The spiritual umbilicus is apparent to all. The dead look upon us with the pure love of a mother’s gaze. But the dead love is even more because of our flawed flesh and eternal confusion. The removal from form allows for total and complete unconditional love. We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.
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Tanya Tagaq (Split Tooth)
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The Ancestors were from Africa and entered into Australia 50,000 years ago. They would have eaten food from indigenous life from their area almost immediately. They harvest most of the day, and eat this food. The AM looks like a food source they already eat in Africa. It is highly likely they did eat it. This is still not enough to say it had connection to religion, but it is enough to say they ate it, in all probability. Forensic DNA shows again that they did eat it, as the retrovirus that was on Amanita Muscaria can only be transferred via consumption by humans and it is known that AM is a vector for this virus. Since they forage daily and consume what they forage it puts the consumption just around the time of 50,000 years ago.
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Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
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Remember, white supremacy is not just about individual acts of racism, but rather it is a system of oppression that seeps into and often forms the foundation of many of the regular spaces where you spend your time—school, work, spiritual spaces, health and wellness spaces, and so on.
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Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
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I firmly believe that American society would not endure ten years if subjected to half the trials and tortures we’ve put Natives through. And yet Native peoples have not been utterly destroyed, not by the world’s strongest military. They have not been totally assimilated, not by the world’s largest religion. Native religions are indeed concerned with being a good person, respecting one’s family, ancestors, community, and the Earth—and when these principles are lived, there is great strength.
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Israel Morrow (Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion)
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For the weeping warriors, for the savage saints,
for the bleeding mothers with fire in their eyes,
for the hidden mystics whose prayers keep the earth spinning,
for the buddhas who'll use their teeth when their blades are broken
and let their evolutionary ancestors howl through them,
this one is for you, my lovelies.
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Caitlin Johnstone (Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers)
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Not knowing the DNA we carry in our bodies, hearts, and minds. does not negate it. We are an accumulation of many people, even more so when unaware of it. Once aware, we can choose what to carry and what to relegate to history.
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Donna Goddard (Nanima: Spiritual Fiction (Dadirri Series, #1))
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In short, the majority of men "without religion" still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies, There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the "unconscious," A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences.
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Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion)
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The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.
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Eugene H. Peterson (Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading)
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Animism is the way humanity has been deeply connected to the land and its seasonal cycles for millennia, in rapport and conversation with the animals, plants, elements, Ancestors and earth spirits. The opposite of animism is the “cult of the individual” so celebrated in modern society, and the loss of the animist worldview is at the root of our spiritual disconnect and looming ecological crisis. Human beings are just one strand woven into the complex systems of Earth Community, and the animistic perspective is fundamental to the paradigm shift, and the recovery of our own ancestral wisdom.
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Pegi Eyers (Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community)
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I see that this body—made of the four elements—is not really me, and I am not limited by this body. I am the whole of the river of life, of blood ancestors and spiritual ancestors, that has been continuously flowing for thousands of years and flows on for thousands of years into the future. I am one with my ancestors and my descendants. I am life manifesting in countless different forms. I am one with all people and all species, whether they are peaceful and joyful or suffering and afraid. At this very moment I am present everywhere in this world. I have been present in the past and will be there in the future. The disintegration of this body does not touch me, just as when the petals of the plum blossom fall it does not mean the end of the plum tree. I see that I am like a wave on the surface of the ocean. I see myself in all the other waves, and I see all the other waves in me. The manifestation or the disappearance of the wave does not lessen the presence of the ocean. My Dharma body and spiritual life are not subject to birth or death. I am able to see my presence before this body manifested and after this body disintegrates. I am able to see my presence outside this body, even in the present moment. Eighty or ninety years is not my life span. My life span, like that of a leaf or of a buddha, is immeasurable. I am able to go beyond the idea that I am a body separate from all other manifestations of life, in time and in space.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art Of Living)
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There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
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Francis S. Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)
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One day I asked my mother, "Mom, where's my dreaming place?" And she took me up in the hills and showed me a waterfall. "That's your dreaming place," she told me. "When you die you'll go back in there. And you'll be there forever. You'll be in that waterfall, watching the seasons come and go like your spiritual ancestors. In that spot, you will be part of the land." That is why we teach you not to harm or even mark the land. That would be like getting a knife and cutting yourself.
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Pauline Gordon
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Lastly, cultural appropriation rewrites history with whiteness at the center. So for example, though yoga has its roots in India as a spiritual practice, it is now seen as a predominantly white-centered practice that is focused largely on physical health.
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Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
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Every aspect of the sea holds profound metaphorical
power. The outer seascape provides so many corollaries for human
psychology in general, and women’s psychology in particular. This
is the reason it has haunted the myths and legends – the psychology
before psychology – of so many cultures. And it is why water is present in most spiritual rituals. The sea speaks to the soul. Our ancestors
knew that beneath the depths lay much wisdom. They knew that the
way to our own depths was through the depths of the ocean.
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Lucy H. Pearce (She of the Sea)
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that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.
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Sam Harris (Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion)
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Our most dismaying failure is in the use of our knowledge of what human beings need in the way of bodily and spiritual nourishment. And I suspect that some of the guesses made by our ancestors are partly responsible for the starved bodies and spirits we see everywhere.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Palm Sunday)
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Our ancestors did not separate magick and witchcraft from their daily lives. Witchcraft was more than just a practice, it was a way of life. A way of looking at the physical and spiritual as a collaborative source of manifestation. In this way, Old World Witchcraft honors the all-encompassing lifestyle of the witch. We are in tune with nature, in tune with ourselves and in alignment with our all-knowing inner witch.
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Dacha Avelin
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They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously—if we seriously listen to this “God within us”—we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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In Africa every human has a spark of divine nature, and sin does not separate us from it. We are cousins of God. Every person has multiple souls, including the souls of ancestors that reincarnate through us. The purest soul is called an ori, and a person who cultivates their ori can attain divinity.
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Israel Morrow (Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion)
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We often fail to deconstruct how proslavery theology still influences American Christianity. But simply put: Theological arguments upheld the institution of slavery long after every other argument failed. American Christian theology was born in a cauldron of proslavery ideology, and one of the spectacular failures of the Christian church today is its inability to name, interrogate, confront, repent, and dismantle the cauldron which has shaped much of its theology. We are daily living with the remnants of a theological white supremacy, coupled with social and political power, which continues to uphold racist ideologies….Can this nation afford to keep ignoring the truth that black people in America live under a threat of racial violence, never quite feeling that we are fully equal citizens in the nation that our enslaved ancestors built?
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Brian D. McLaren (The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian)
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The distance runners were serene messengers. Gliding along wooded trails and mountain paths, their spiritual ancestors kept their own solitary counsel for long hours while carrying some message the import of which was only one corner of their considerable speculation. They lived within themselves; long ago they did so, and they do today. There
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John L. Parker Jr. (Once a Runner)
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Listen to the Earth. It speaks.
Listen to the Fire. It speaks.
Listen to the Wind. It speaks.
Listen to the Water. It speaks.
Listen to your Heart. It knows.
—the Ancestors
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Doug Good Feather (Think Indigenous: Native American Spirituality for a Modern World)
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It is better to pray with a pure heart before the family altar than to perform gaudy ceremonies in a pagoda, clad in the robes of an unworthy bonze.
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Huỳnh Phú Sổ
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You are not Flesh & Blood – You are the Master of It”
- Drø the Finder –
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H.D. Rennerfeldt (Vigilant Ancestor: A World of Secrets Whispered in My Ear)
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Fate is What You are Born With; Free-Will is What You Do About It”
- Drø the Finder –
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H.D. Rennerfeldt (Vigilant Ancestor: A World of Secrets Whispered in My Ear)
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It’s time to remember our ancestors.
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Jessica Marie Baumgartner (The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice)
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your cackle reverberates through the ether as if there were 3000 ancestors laughing with you.
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Ofelia Nibari
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If you need some change and some clarity, go to your altar.
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Robin S. Baker
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Never venture near the toxic family war zone without your security detail of angels, spirit guides, and ancestors by your side.
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Anthon St. Maarten
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Who built this tree of universe that has not stopped changing from the very minute (atomic) times undergoing many beautiful and wonderful changes; Who must eat fruits bearing from this tree? Why is that all are not eating these fruits equally without differences? What is the reason? Could someone like us plant another tree like that? Why not? The eternal that does not dry up but continues to give required fruits to the souls. This creator, is he in front of us or not? If not how does this work? Without doubt we all realize that work does not happen without a reason. Therefore, one who is giving us this variety of unlimited fruits without end in this tree of universe must be immensely powerful, with unlimited knowledge, unfathomable, have infinite empathy and having many other amazing qualities. His existence is documented in all vedas and puranas. Although he exists, the reason we are not able to witness, we have to admit is our deficiency in body, faculty and mind. Our ancestors called and praised him as “Paramatma and Sarveshvara.” We have to resolve that we will practice sadhana to be able to see Paramatma and offer to Sarveshvara with great devotion our spiritual practices, without desire for any benefits. This is called Ishwarapranidhana.
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Tirumalai Krishnamacharya
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I remember feeling the jolt of history when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. For many of us, that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.
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Sam Harris (Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion)
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Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.
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Saginaw Chippewa
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Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.
Polak and I had often very heated discussions about the desirability or otherwise of giving the children an English education. It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They deprive them of the spiritual and social heritage of the nation, and render them to that extent unfit for the service of the country. Having these convictions, I made a point of always talking to my children in Gujarati. Polak never liked this. He thought I was spoiling their future. He contended, with all the vigour and love at his command, that, if children were to learn a universal language like English from their infancy, they would easily gain considerable advantage over others in the race of life. He failed to convince me. I do not now remember whether I convinced him of the correctness of my attitude, or whether he gave me up as too obstinate. This happened about twenty years ago, and my convictions have only deepened with experience. Though my sons have suffered for want of full literary education, the knowledge of the mother-tongue that they naturally acquired has been all to their and the country’s good, inasmuch as they do not appear the foreigners they would otherwise have appeared. They naturally became bilingual, speaking and writing English with fair ease, because of daily contact with a large circle of English friends, and because of their stay in a country where English was the chief language spoken.
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Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi: An Autobiography)
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The echo is a gift, passed on to us by our ancestors many ages ago, to remind us of ourselves. To confirm our existence. To remedy our loneliness. Though we must be still in order to hear it.
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Thomas Lloyd Qualls (Painted Oxen)
“
From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Many generations past, before even the Spaniards came, hundreds of years ago, maybe even thousands.” He shrugged, shook his head. “My ancestors lived along the Mississippi. Back then they were known as the Downstream People. Moundbuilders, it’s said. No one knows why they did this, not now, but most tell that the mounds were spiritual, the dwelling places for spirits, good and bad. The spirit of the Shanka’ Tunka is one kind of spirit that stayed there, an evil one. Legend has it he awakens every hundred years or so, roams the land looking for a likely soul to take, someone who ain’t too far from evil himself.
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Phil Truman (Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery (Jubal Smoak Mysteries Book 1))
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We also believe that from our end of this undulating time line, we have a certain omnipotence. We can see the mistakes and blunders of the past far more clearly than the people who were living through them. (p. 77)
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Margaret Bendroth (The Spiritual Practice of Remembering)
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Our ancestors have a lot to teach us. This is not because they were wiser or more devout than we are or “better” Christians, though we can’t rule out such possibilities. It is because they can point us toward what is essential. (p. 50)
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Margaret Bendroth (The Spiritual Practice of Remembering)
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Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a
machine
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Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot)
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This implicit and explicit bias that Fleming draws our attention to exists not just within professional tennis but also in homes, at schools and educational institutions, in businesses, in spiritual spaces, on the internet, and in every space where white supremacy exists.
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Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
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Time and time again, technology, along with advances in neuroscience and even genetics, seems to be validating things our ancestors knew all along by revealing exactly what happens physiologically during meditation and how regular practice can improve our bodies and minds.
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Benjamin W Decker
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The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.
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Criss Jami (Healology)
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The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line.
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Gustav Meyrink (The Golem)
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I have since learned that although the festival of Imbolc was far less romantic and far more practical to our Celtic ancestors than the initial image portrayed to me by Mrs Darley, it was no less magical, for it marked the beginning of the lambing season which to the Celts meant the difference between survival and extinction.
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Carole Carlton (Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year)
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Actually, the urban dweller today is more isolated in the big city than his ancestors were in the countryside. The city man in the modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomization, and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history. Today man's alienation from man is almost absolute. His standards of co-operation, mutual aid, simple human hospitality, and decency have suffered an appalling amount of erosion in the urban milieu. Man's civic institutions have become cold, impersonal agencies for the manipulation of his destiny, and his culture has increasingly accommodated itself to the least common denominator of intelligence and taste.
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Murray Bookchin (Our Synthetic Environment)
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You have to know a lot of songs to cook the way our ancestors cooked. The songs are like clocks with spells. Some enslaved cooks timed the cooking by the stanzas of the hymns and spirituals, or little folk songs that began across the Atlantic and melted into plantation Creole, melting Africa with Europe until beginnings and endings were muddied.
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Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
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VISION OF A WISARD
How many of you wish to be Wizards when you grow old?
How many of you want to fly?
I wished to become a dragon – he said
And he looked at us with eyes filled with fire
The Wizard of Earth’s Sea
Descended to tell us a secret of
ABRACADABRA
Get to know – he said - God’s true name
The word will initiate Power
Gate keepers of Ancient Knowledge
Will open their doors
Mythological Archetypes will start their dance
Leading you to your tribal clout
Skeletons scattered over the burial grounds
Ancestors with their weapons and spears
Saints and Demons
Doctors and Gypsies
Healers and Witches
Will join you to celebrate
The Birth of Self
Power of Mind over Body
The Vision of the Dominion of Light
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Nataša Pantović (Tree of Life with Spiritual Poetry (AoL Mindfulness, #9))
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All humans on earth are one. We descend from the same family of common ancestors. We are, in a quite literal sense, siblings, and like siblings we depend on each other's love and care and responsibility. We are interdependent not just in our families and communities, but in nations, and increasingly on a global scale - just as we are also interdependent with nature and the earth.
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Alexis Karpouzos (The self-criticism of science)
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The worship of the “Great Mystery” was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.
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Charles Alexander Eastman (The Soul of the Indian)
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Technology provides access to more power than our ancestors would have thought possible but does not guide us as to what to do with that power. Similarly, the market provides us with endless choices but does not tell us how to use these choices. And our liberal, individualist and faithless state gives us freedom, but provides no intellectual, moral or spiritual guidance for how to use that freedom.
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Sean A. Culey (Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity)
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You deserve success in every area of your life. I love you, unconditionally, no matter what happened to you, no matter what was done to you or not done for you. I also love you unconditionally, no matter what terrible things you have done in this life. And I love your parents and ancestors and accept them unconditionally. My prayer for you and your family is that you all know unconditional love, joy, and peace.
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Tara Bianca (The Flower of Heaven: Opening the Divine Heart Through Conscious Friendship & Love Activism)
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The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I
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C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
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But even among the great traditional peoples, the situation is not different: from China to Greece, from Rome to the primordial Nordic groups, then up to Aztecs and the Incas, nobility was not characterised by the simple fact of having ancestors, but by the fact that the ancestors of the nobility were divine, unlike those of plebeians and to which it can remain faithful, also through the integrity of blood. The nobles originated from 'demigods', that is to say, from beings who had actually followed a transcendent form of life, forming the origin of tradition in the higher sense, transmitting to their lineage a blood made divine, and, along with it, rites, that is, determinate operations, whose secret every noble family preserved, which allowed their descendants to continue the spiritual conquest from where it had previously reached, and to lead it from the virtual to the actual.
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Julius Evola
“
The intangible, as you can guess, creates some decidedly strange and perceived dichotomies for scientific interpretations. Ask a scientist what the definition of electricity is and he might rattle off, “It is the physical phenomena arising from the reaction of electrons and protons…” Note the word “…phenomena…” in the above statement - it is the key word. It is used as a reference in the philosophical usage rather than as a scientific justification.
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H.D. Rennerfeldt (Vigilant Ancestor: A World of Secrets Whispered in My Ear)
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To believe with certain "neoyogists" that "evolution" will produce a superman "who will differ from man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable" is not to know what man is: it is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom that deems itself vastly superior to the "separatist" religions but in fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechism. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; that in one particular respect--that of spiritual possibilities and not of animal nature--the difference between a monkey and a man is "infinitely" greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and this is the reason he cannot be surpassed by a new earthly being in any way. Man is central among the beings of the earth; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center if definitions have any meaning.
This neoyogism, like other similar movements, pretends that it can add an essential value to the wisdom of our ancestors; it believes the religions are partial truths that it is called upon to paste together after centuries or millennia of waiting and then to crown with its own naive little system.
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Frithjof Schuon (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts)
“
All pre-Abrahamic cultures understood the tremendous importance of remaining closely connected to the past if the present was to be invested with any spiritually significant meaning. They also understood that the most personally relevant and accessible portal to the empowering wisdom and goodness of the past was through their own direct ancestors, those who shared their particular bloodline and DNA. It was for this reason that all traditional cultures engaged in what is often called ancestor worship (pitri-puja). There is no pre-Abrahamic culture on Earth that did not honor its ancestors in one form or another. This is a very important spiritual practice and tradition that used to be practiced universally by families in the ancient past. The process of ancestor worship now needs to be revived in the modern world if we are to not lose our sacred connection with our own cultural-spiritual heritage. Ancestor worship must become a regular practice again.
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Dharma Pravartaka Acharya
“
To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old* improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as now seems probable, that our planet is one of billions of other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is possible; to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important—if occasionally rueful—reflections on human nature. Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
One last Unseen entities possessed my mind in the chaos of their worship. Created by the heathen ancestors, deceased objects by otherworldy divinities provide comfort in my psyche. The whirlwind of its carnage gives me a hymn to lament for. The sun is my Deity, and I enjoy watching the world scorch while worshipping it. I am like a deity without a God because the universe is a pleasure in my thoughts. The only way I can experience life is through an illusion, such as being like a divine being, which molds and forsakes any belief in oneself in the absence of a God.
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D.L. Lewis
“
What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say - as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.
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Valarie Kaur (See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love)
“
For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain.
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Boria Sax (City of Ravens: The Extraordinary History of London, its Tower and Its Famous Ravens)
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Religions, creeds, drama, poetry, games, folklore, folk tales, mythology, moral and aesthetic codes' elements of the political and juridical life affirming a personality's value , freedom and tolerance ; philosophy, theater, galleries , museums, libraries-this is the unbroken line of human culture, the first act of which has been played in heaven between God and man. That is climbing the holy mountain , the top of which remains unreachable' marching through darkness by means of the blazing candle carried by man.
Civilization is the continuation of technical rather than spiritual progress in the same way that Darwinian evolution is the continuation of biological rather than human progress. Civilization represents the development of the potential forces that existed in our less developed ancestors. It is a continuation of the natural , mechanical elements-that is, of the unconscious, senseless elements of our existence. Therefore, civilization is neither good nor bad in itself. Man must create civilization , just as he must breathe or eat. It is an expression of necessity and of our lack of freedom. Culture ,on the contrary, is the ever-present feeling of choice and expression of human freedom.
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Alija Izetbegović
“
In the Ghost Dance religion of just a hundred years ago, a desperate people tried to assimilate Christianity into their native religion. They believed that their ancestors would come back to help them in their fight against white soldiers and settlers; their warriors wore shirts they believed the soldiers’ bullets could not penetrate. Though this seems tragic to Western eyes, some Lakota credit the Ghost Dance with helping them preserve their ancient religious traditions over the last century. Others have found in it a viable blend of Christianity and the old religion. “I’m a good Catholic,” one elderly woman told me, “and I also carry the pipe.
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Kathleen Norris (Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Dakotas))
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The theoretical perspective of worldmaking and the concrete task of climate justice both force us to contend with the immense scale of injustice and thus the immense scale of the struggle for justice. It may well be outside of any generation’s ability to win outright. But if we choose to relate to the world as ancestors, we can prevent this realization from overwhelming us into political paralysis. Many of the things that we do every day link us with countless people who have come before us and—if we succeed at preventing the worst climate outcomes—countless people who will come after us. We can do the spiritual work to act from this knowledge and faith right now. The world depends on it.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Reconsidering Reparations)
“
Once he has recognized his invisible guide, a mystic sometimes decides to trace his own isnlld, to reveal his spiritual genealogy, that is, to disclose the "chain of transmission" culminating in his person and bear witness to the spiritual ascendancy which he invokes across the generations of mankind. He does neither more nor less than to designate by name the minds to whose family he is conscious of belonging. Read in the opposite order from their phenomenological emergence, these genealogies take on the appearance of true genealogies. Judged by the rules of _our historical criticism, the claim of these genealogies to truth seems highly precarious. Their relevance is to another "transhistoric truth," which cannot be regarded as inferior (because it is of a different order) to the material historic truth whose claim to truth, with the documentation at our disposal, is no less precarious. Suhrawardi traces the family tree of the IshrlqiyOn back to Hermes, ancestor of the Sages, (that Idris-Enoch of Islamic prophetology, whom Ibn rArabi calls the prophet of the Philosophers) ; from him are descended the Sages of Greece and Persia, who are followed by certain �ofis (Abo Yazid Bastlmi, Kharraqlni, I;Ialllj, and the choice seems particularly significant in view of what has been said above about the Uwaysis}, and all these branches converge in his own doctrine and school. This is not a history of philosophy in our sense of the term; but still less is it a mere fantasy.
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Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi)
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1.The moment you realize that the person you cared for has nothing intellectually or spiritually to offer you, but a headache.
2. The moment you realize God had greater plans for you that don’t involve crying at night or sad Pinterest quotes.
3. The moment you stop comparing yourself to others because it undermines your worth, education and your parent’s wisdom.
4. The moment you live your dreams, not because of what it will prove or get you, but because that is all you want to do. People’s opinions don’t matter.
5. The moment you realize that no one is your enemy, except yourself.
6. The moment you realize that you can have everything you want in life. However, it takes timing, the right heart, the right actions, the right passion and a willingness to risk it all. If it is not yours, it is because you really didn’t want it, need it or God prevented it.
7. The moment you realize the ghost of your ancestors stood between you and the person you loved. They really don't want you mucking up the family line with someone that acts anything less than honorable.
8. The moment you realize that happiness was never about getting a person. They are only a helpmate towards achieving your life mission.
9. The moment you believe that love is not about losing or winning. It is just a few moments in time, followed by an eternity of situations to grow from.
10. The moment you realize that you were always the right person. Only ignorant people walk away from greatness.”
― Shannon L. Alder
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Shannon L. Alder
“
Unlike ancient Israel, America is not a covenant nation. God has made no promise to our physical ancestors that guarantees our national status. If Israel had to fulfill the conditions for divine blessing, even though God had covenanted with them as His chosen people, America certainly has no inviolable claim on the blessing of God. As long as unbelief and disobedience to the Word of God color the soul of our nation, we simply cannot expect the blessing of God. Israel didn’t get it in her unbelief. But for those of us who are Christians, the covenant blessings do apply. “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). All the promises of salvation, mercy, forgiveness of sins, and spiritual prosperity are ours to claim as long as we remain faithful to God. That is why the spiritual state of the church in our nation is the key to the blessing of the nation as a whole. If God is going to bless America, it will not be for the sake of the nation itself. He blesses the nation, and has always done so, for the sake of His people. If we who are called by His name are not fulfilling the conditions for divine blessing, there is no hope whatsoever for the rest of the nation. On the other hand, if the church is fit to receive God’s blessing, the whole nation will be the beneficiary of that, because the Word of God will be proclaimed with power, God will add to His church, and spiritual blessings of all kinds will result. And those are the truest blessings of all.
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (The MacArthur Daily Bible: Read through the Bible in one year, with notes from John MacArthur, NKJV)
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In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.
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Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
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Though magic does often bring us the things we desire, satisfying our cravings is not magic’s primary purpose. Magic connects people to their roots, to their spiritual ancestors and allies, to the hundreds of thousands of beings who have gone before them experiencing similar struggles. A creative act, magic brings richness to your life. When you’re cold and alone, your chants might be all you have to keep you alive. Even when it feels like all of civilization has conspired in its effort to take it from you, magic gives you hope, magic gives you pleasure, and most importantly, magic helps you remember you have power, even if you can’t see a way to use it yet. The fact that magic connects people to their power is the main reason most systems of oppression attempt to ban it.
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Amanda Yates Garcia (Initiated: Memoir of a Witch)
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Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy—Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human—are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous viruses often lie hidden, malware that must be identified and purged from our software if we want our future to be different from our past. We are realizing that our ancestors didn’t merely misinterpret a few Scriptures in their day; rather, they consistently practiced a dangerous form of interpretation that deserves to be discredited, rejected, and replaced by a morally wiser form of interpretation today. (We
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Brian D. McLaren (The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian)
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What a tragedy it is when one trusts the jealousy of his friends. What a tragedy it is when one trusts the values of a society built to trap souls within its system. What a tragedy it is, when one is afraid to oppose the protective love of his own family, rooted in the fears of the ancestors. What a tragedy it is when one is afraid to contradict his own thoughts, rooted in his own traumatic experiences. What a tragedy it is, when men and women of religion, are afraid to think. What a tragedy it is, when men and women of science, are afraid to feel. What a tragedy it is when we call that life and glorify spiritual death as if it was a trophy. For the one who lives must battle such things inside his own nature, and will never be able to share victories with those who are too frightened to awaken.
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Dan Desmarques
“
This example, it seems to us, suffices to show in what way the nonreligious man of modern societies is still nourished and aided by the activity of his unconscious, yet without thereby attaining to a properly religious experience and vision of the world. The unconscious offers him solutions for the difficulties of his own life, and in this way plays the role of religion, for, before making an existence a creator of values, religion ensures its integrity, From one point of view it could almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious—which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. Or, from the Christian point of view, it could also be said that nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man— in other words, that nonreligious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first "fall," his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world. After the first "fall," the religious sense descended to the level of the ' 'divided" consciousness"; now, after the second, it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has been "forgotten," Here the considerations of the historian of religions end.
Here begins the realm of problems proper to the philosopher, the psychologist, and even the theologian.
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Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion)
“
Therefore, it is believed that the ancestors return after a lapse of tiem as if to a general and spiritual reservoir from which they will sooner or later unite once more with human bodies and human souls as their stimuli and impulses to life. ... Such is more or less the idea of Confucianism. And the only exception is that all human beings are not viewed as equally immortal. Whoever has harmonized his nature and caused his existence to be so effective as to emanate magical powers because they can transform and act creatively, such a person will not return after death. He will not be a Kuei, but a Shen. Shen means someone divinely effective -- man as hero, who is connected with the entire cultural complex. The duration of the culture is also his duration, because his life endures in the pantheon of this culture.
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Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm
“
The scientists not only sanctified human feelings, but also found an excellent evolutionary reason to do so. After Darwin, biologists began explaining that feelings are complex algorithms honed by evolution to help animals make correct decisions. Our love, our fear and our passion aren’t some nebulous spiritual phenomena good only for composing poetry. Rather, they encapsulate millions of years of practical wisdom. When you read the Bible you are getting advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality-control tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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Prayer is one of the few spiritual practices that is pointless unless God is real. Meditation calms the body whether or not there's a spiritual being receiving our deliberate breathing and clear mind. Reading sacred texts aligns us with the wisdom of our ancestors whether or not it was divinely inspired. Church attendance connects us to the needs of our community. Fasting cleanses the body of toxic substances. Resting on Sundays allows us to let go of stress and worry. But prayer? Taking time to pour out our needs and our anxieties, demanding change, confessing sin, crying out for help - all of these things depend upon the existence of God, and specifically the existence of a God who hears and responds to our cries. Prayer in the face of insurmountable problems is an admission of weakness and need. Prayer is a commitment to a better future, a sign of faith that the world will one day be made right. Prayer is an act that emerges out of helplessness. Prayer is an act of hope.
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Amy Julia Becker (White Picket Fences: Turning toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege)
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O Krishna, what satisfaction could we find in killing Dhritarashtra's sons? We would become sinners by slaying these men, even though they are evil. The sons of Dhritarashtra are related to us: therefore, we should not kill them. How can we gain happiness by kiling members of our own family?
Though they are overpowered by greed and see no evil in destroying families or injuring friends, we see these evils. Why shouldn't we turn away from this sin? When a family declines, ancient traditions are destroyed. With them are lost the spiritual foundations for life, and the family loses its sense of unity. Where there is no sense of unity, the women of the family become corrupt; and with the corruption of its women, society is plunged into chaos. Social chaos is hell for the family and for those who have destroyed the family as well. It disrupts the process of spiritual evolution begun by our ancestors. The timeless spiritual foundations of family and society would be destroyed by these terrible deeds, which violate the unity of life.
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Eknath Easwaran (The Bhagavad Gita)
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If more Christians today summon the courage to take seriously the dark sides of our history, we will wake up to the degree to which our religion still interprets the Bible exactly as our misguided ancestors did.28 (No, we don’t draw exactly the same conclusions, but we have neither acknowledged nor rejected the method of reading the Bible that made those unacceptable interpretations acceptable.) If we face our past, we will see how many power centers within the Christian community still carry white Christian supremacy and white Christian privilege cards in their back pockets, often without even knowing they do so, and as a result can be found consistently allying themselves with oppressors rather than the oppressed. We will see behind the curtain, so to speak, exposing how many Christians still drink the old cocktails: of God and gold (including the “black gold” of fossil fuels), of Christianity and white supremacy, of Christianity and privilege, of Christianity and colonialism, of Christianity and exceptionalism, of Christianity and violence.
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Brian D. McLaren (The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian)
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Human beings are really bad at loneliness. We’re not built for it. People have been attracted to tribes of like-minded others ever since the time of ancient humans, who communed in close-knit groups for survival. But beyond the evolutionary advantage, community also makes us feel a mysterious thing called happiness. Neuroscientists have found that our brains release feel-good chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin when we partake in transcendent bonding rituals, like group chanting and singing. Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors used to pack their village squares to engage in ritualistic dances, though there was no practical need for them. Modern citizens of countries like Denmark and Canada, whose governments prioritize community connection (through high-quality public transportation, neighborhood co-ops, etc.), self-report higher degrees of satisfaction and fulfillment. All kinds of research points to the idea that humans are social and spiritual by design. Our behavior is driven by a desire for belonging and purpose. We’re “cultish” by nature.
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Amanda Montell (Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence)
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Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements.
In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect.
This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage.
It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard.
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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (The Prison Notes)
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Every primitive society possesses a consistent body of mythical traditions, a 'conception of the world'; and it is this conception that is gradually revealed to the novice in the course of his initiation. What is involved is not simply instruction in the modern sense of the word. In order to become worthy of the sacred teaching, the novice must first be prepared spiritually. For what he learns concerning the world and human life does not constitute knowledge in the modern sense of the term, objective and compartmentalized information, subject to indefinite correction and addition. The world is sacred the work of Supernatural Beings — a divine work and hence in its very structure. Man lives in a universe that is not only supernatural in origin, but is no less sacred in its form, sometimes even in its substance. The world has a 'history': first, its creation by Supernatural Beings; then, everything that took place after that — the coming of the civilizing Hero or the mythical Ancestor, their cultural activities, their demiurgic adventures, and at last their disappearance.
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Mircea Eliade (Rites and Symbols of Initiation)
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QUESTLOVE: How do you get that back? Does being downtrodden make us spiritual again?
WEST: I don't think it's just a matter of the material conditions; it's a matter of the choices that we make. Our ancestors could have chosen forms of spiritual suicide and spiritual blackout, but they decided not to, even in the midst of slavery, even in the midst of Jim Crow. Great-great grandma could have chosen to commit suicide. But she said no, her kids said no. The love said no. "I choose to be on the love train, even under slave-like conditions." That's a choice we make. All we have had as a people, historically—amid the levels of hatred, the social death of slavery, the civic death of Jim Crow, the psychological death of hating one's self, the spiritual death of giving up and selling out and caving in—all we have is a subversive memory, personal integrity, and courageous witness in the fight for justice. That's all we've got. You do away with the memory, and people can't hear the voice of a Glenn Jones or, my favorite, Gerald Levert. With no memory, you get very little artistic integrity, just a matter of stimulating people for the market, and then no creative witness.
”
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Cornel West
“
In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes.
We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music.
We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)
”
”
Margaret Bendroth (The Spiritual Practice of Remembering)
“
Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all.
For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line.
Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs.
We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like.
Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now.
To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.
By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.
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Martin Prechtel (The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)
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1. As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, modern society created for itself a self-congratulatory myth, the myth of “progress”: From the time of our remote, ape-like ancestors, human history had been an unremitting march toward a better and brighter future, with everyone joyously welcoming each new technological advance: animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel, the construction of cities, the invention of writing and of money, sailing ships, the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine, and, at last, the crowning human achievement—modern industrial society! Prior to industrialization, nearly everyone was condemned to a miserable life of constant, backbreaking labor, malnutrition, disease, and an early death. Aren’t we so lucky that we live in modern times and have lots of leisure and an array of technological conveniences to make our lives easy?
Today I think there are relatively few thoughtful, honest and well-informed people who still believe in this myth. To lose one’s faith in “progress” one has only to look around and see the devastation of our environment, the spread of nuclear weapons, the excessive frequency of depression, anxiety disorders and psychological stress, the spiritual emptiness of a society that nourishes itself principally with television and computer games…one could go on and on.
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Theodore John Kaczynski (Technological Slavery)
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Ultimately there is a rank ordering of spiritual conditions, with which the rank ordering of problems is consistent, and the highest problems shove back without mercy anyone who dares approach them without having been predestined to solve them with the loftiness and power of his spirituality. What help is it if nimble heads of nondescript people or, as happens so often these days, clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists with their plebeian ambition press forward into the presence of such problems and, as it were, up to the “court of courts”!
But on such carpets crude feet may never tread: there is still a primeval law of things to look after that: the doors remain closed to these people who push against them, even if they bang or crush their heads against them! One must be born for every lofty world: to put the matter more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: one has a right to philosophy — taking the word in its grand sense — only thanks to one’s descent, one’s ancestors; here, as well, “blood” decides.
For a philosopher to arise, many generations must have done the preparatory work. Every single one of his virtues must have been acquired, cared for, passed on, assimilated, and not just the bold, light, delicate walking and running of his thoughts, but, above all, the willingness to take on great responsibilities, the loftiness of the look which dominates and gazes down, the feeling of standing apart from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable protecting and defending of what is misunderstood and slandered, whether god or devil, the desire for and practice of great justice, the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks upward, seldom loves.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good And Evil)
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People of Earth know nothing about the heart. And the ones who do, address love as the need to bleed. And it is indeed so. This materialistic world of mentally-obsessed humanoids will never allow true love to show itself. The ones who possess a better understanding often walk alone, love alone, and feel alone, with their partners, groups and the world itself. Altruism is not a disease, a curse or a punishment, although it usually feels that way. Altruism is not even a price we pay for being spiritually free. Altruism, as death or birth, is just what it is. It just happens. The feelings attached to it are merely an awakening to the realization of the gap between oneself and the remaining of his prehistoric ancestors. One moves apart, into the future, in his evolution, and looks back at his brothers and sisters, trapped in the dogmas of the past, not realizing one can’t travel in time in body but only in spirit. And in this sense, none of us ever escapes the prison. Not in body. Only in mind. The mind has the key we look for outside ourselves. The heart helps the blind of spirit find it. And when humanity, as a whole, realizes this, it will ascend. But for now, unfortunately, many will have to suffer and pay with their own life, before this realization becomes common sense. Before the many books that have been written, are finally read by the masses and understood as they were intended by the creators. Before we realize that all the wars are being fought in our mind and merely being represented in the material playground like a theatrical play to which we all contribute with our own mental script, daily written and adjusted by the collective conscience and its concepts of right and wrong, true and false, justice and injustice, real and unreal.
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Robin Sacredfire
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At the time of the Fourth Fire, the history of another people came to be braided into ours. Two prophets arose among the people, foretelling the coming of the light-skinned people in ships from the east, but their visions differed in what was to follow. The path was
not clear, as it cannot be with the future. The first prophet said that if the offshore people, the zaaganaash, came in brotherhood, they
would bring great knowledge. Combined with Anishinaabe ways of knowing, this would form a great new nation. But the second prophet sounded a warning: He said that what looks like the face of brotherhood might be the face of death. These new people might come with brotherhood, or they might come with greed for the riches of our land. How would we know which face is the true one?
If the fish became poisoned and the water unfit to drink, we would know which face they wore.
And for their actions the zaaganaash
came to be known instead as chimokman—Vne long-knife people.
The prophecies described what eventually became history. They warned the people of those who would come among them with
black robes and black books, with promises of joy and salvation. The prophets said that if the people turned against their own sacred ways and followed this black-robe path, then the people would suffer for many generations. Indeed, the burial of our spiritual teachings in the time of the Fifth Fire nearly broke the hoop of the nation. People became separated from their homelands and from each other as they were forced onto reservations. Their children
were taken from them to learn the zaaganaash ways. Forbidden by law to practice their own religion, they nearly lost an ancient worldview. Forbidden to speak their languages, a universe of knowing vanished in a generation. The land was fragmented, the people separated, the old ways blowing away in the wind; even the
plants and animals began to turn their faces away from us. The time was foretold when the children would turn away from the elders; people would lose their way and their purpose in life. They prophesied that, in the time of the Sixth Fire, “the cup of life would almost become the cup of grief.” And yet, even after all of this, there is something that remains, a coal that has not been extinguished. At the First Fire, so long ago, the people were told
that it is their spiritual lives that will keep them strong.
They say that a prophet appeared with a strange and distant light in his eyes. The young man came to the people with the message that in the time of the seventh fire, a new people would emerge with a sacred purpose. It would not be easy for them. They would have to be strong and determined in their work, for they stood at a crossroads.
The ancestors look to them from the flickering light of distant fires. In this time, the young would turn back to the elders for teachings and find that many had nothing to give. The people of the Seventh Fire do not yet walk forward; rather, they are told to turn around and retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here. Their sacred purpose is to walk back along the red road of our ancestors’ path and to gather up all the fragments that lay
scattered along the trail. Fragments of land, tatters of language, bits of songs, stories, sacred teachings—all that was dropped along
the way. Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire. We are the ones the ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to
the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of a nation.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in connection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories: (I) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires, expelling 'evil' and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return of the dead); (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the ensuing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, 'death' corresponds to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic expression of the end of a mode of being the mode of ignorance and of the child's irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term 'culture,' comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during initiation.
All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated-in the present instance, without the child's dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time. But the first time, the thing-this class of objects, this animal, this particular behavior-did not exist: when, in the beginning, this object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing.
Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares: birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos), rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a member of the modern societies conceives death). These images and symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination, with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other valuations of initiatory death-for example, joining the company of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits.
For archaic thought, then, man is made-he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model.
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Mircea Eliade (Rites and Symbols of Initiation)
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experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2
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David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
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For Du Bois, the taproot of the collective soul of black Americans was the Negro spiritual. It was to the African-American what the Nibelungenlied is to the Teuton or The Odyssey to the Greek, the expression in an archaic poetic idiom of the Volk’s spiritual strivings, revealing an inner strength that has endured enslavement and persecution. Just as German “folk psychologists” explained that a people’s past, recycled as myth, could become a permanent part of their collective “soul experience,” Du Bois now suggested that this was what had happened with slavery. Far from being relegated to the past, it determined all subsequent meaningful cultural activity for black people. Having black blood in America meant having the soul experience of being a slave, even if (as in the case of Du Bois) none of one’s family members or ancestors had actually been in bondage.
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Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
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Fear is about knowing all the bad things that can happen to you and still move forward to achieve your goals. The greatest fears are related to humiliation, shame and death. Three thousand years ago, shame, humiliation and death, was about dying in a war and then have the head put in a stick for everyone else to see. One thousand years after, it was about being naked in a cross and left there to die in front of everyone. One thousand and five hundred years after, it was related to burning in a pole after being accused of witchcraft. But, in recent times, it’s just related to losing a job, the family and friends. Humiliation is often related to shame and most people don’t change their life because they fear being ridiculed and despised, even though they don’t face death as much as their ancestors once did. Great leaders make the difference among the majority, by refusing to stop themselves when seeing such reaction in those around them. For example, there was once a kid in Austria that wished to become an artist but was humiliated by his father and mother, ridiculed by his classmates and later on sentenced to jail by his government. However, years later, that person became someone we still tremble when hearing the name - Hitler. There was another one that was persecuted all his life, humiliated even in the day he died and became the most well-known and popular person in the world – Jesus Christ. Accepting defeat in life and even losing life itself, or facing ridicule from those that are most important to us, and still follow our heart, is part of the path to ultimate victory. Whatever we choose for our fate, challenges can make us stronger and the inner war against fear also.
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Dan Desmarques (Codex Illuminatus: Quotes & Sayings of Dan Desmarques)
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Basically each religion has certain practices that form the essence of vedic dharma. Yegyes, literally meaning ‘to offer’, forms the backbone of the vedic absolute knowledge. Traditionally, a ritualistic fire ceremony in which various herbs, clarified butter (ghee), specific wood, etc. are offered to the fire with predetermined mantras (charged with vibrations) chanted by predetermined people (priests, host, pandits etc.) with a resolve or sankalpa, a Yegyes has far-reaching effects that encompass physical, soul, social, spiritual and ecological spheres, causing purification at all these levels.
A devout householder is supposed to perform five Yegyes on daily basis>
1. Brahma Egyes = Daily jap, daily meditation, daily yoga, offering into the interior fires of prana, mind, intellect and consciousness
2. Deva-Egyes = Worship offering to the Divinities, God, the Sun, Devi and Devtas through fire in the Vedic times, through watering and Pooja, flowers, fruits rituals.
3. Pitr-Egyes = Offerings to ancestors, manes, and daily worshipful service to one’s living parents and elders
4. Atithi-Egyes = Worship offering to guests the word Atithi means one who comes without making a date hospitality is not a social act but a worship.
5. Offering-Egyes = offering to God, Goddess, Devi, Devtas and Bhagawan, beings, spreading knowledge putting aside the first food for the wandering cows or other animals as well as putting aside daily before cooking similarly like some uncooked rice, daal, grain, flour, for giving away to the temple, church, gumba, gurudwar, priest, monk, beggar or orphanage nowadays.
The philosophy of Egyes, which essentially is: make yourself into a worshipful offering and pour yourself into the divine fire of knowledge, the immortal soul of knowledge. The fire offering you witnessed is an embodiment of all this teaching and the participants are actually very conscious of it.
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Shreeom Surye shiva devkota
“
When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology—like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forebears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness.
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C.S. Lewis
“
little passerine hitching upward
spiraling around tree trunk of morning news
in the morning we gather rain boots, jackets, petitions,
astrological charts, field guides to the birds and stars
the language of the Loon is the memory of our ancestors
black on white, white on black, tremolo call
from PLUTO CROSSES THE ECLIPTIC
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Gwendolyn Morgan (Before the Sun Rises)
“
Reverence for the ancestors refers to a thoughtful regard for the many people, famous and unknown, who have preceded us on the spiritual path. They were no better equipped than we are; they experienced the same trials and tribulations we experience. Attaining a certain enlightenment, they resisted adopting images of themselves as enlightened; they simply persevered and were faithful to the end. Through reflecting on their perseverance and patience, we are helped to keep steady on our path, and to bridge the chasm of our fears. We honor them when we correct our attitude and return to the true and the good within ourselves
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Carol K. Anthony (A Guide to the I Ching)
“
They call our ancestors demons. They insunuate that we shared our lives, meals, and dreams with demons.
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Mitta Xinindlu
“
I haughtily dismissed the principles sponsored by philosophers, religious leaders, and the ideas of poets in exchange for seeking financial stability and shallow happiness. I imported into my conceited consciousness the values of a freewheeling American society, a culture that fawns on rich and famous celebrities, applauds fantastic risk-taking, and promotes a permissive lifestyle. I lack serious ambition – romantic or practical – to achieve any intellectual or spiritual worthwhile accomplishments. Decrepit and friendless, I am so lost that I do not even know what bellwether I seek. I went astray by callously disrespecting the life sustaining lessons handed down by our ancestors. Only by stripping myself of the rank costume cloaking personal shame, a remorseful suit of motley skin that I stitched together by living a selfishly tailored life, can embark on a journey to discover a better way to live.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Plants help us navigate finding harmony by supporting knowledge of the Self, which creates agency and power. Plant medicine turns us inward to witness the Self, reclaim our ancestors’ resilience, and fortify our spirits so we can do the work of healing.
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Karen Rose (Art & Practice of Spiritual Herbalism: Transform, Heal, and Remember with the Power of Plants and Ancestral Medicine)
“
The body yearns to return to ancestral wisdom and connection. And the body becomes a great wake-up call when disharmony enters to change our pattern of thinking and living. These issues come up so they can guide us to wholeness and integration. If you are here, the ancestors chose you to begin this vital work. This book will guide you through this process of self-healing and ultimately healing past and future generations. Know that you are enough and step forward.
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Karen Rose (Art & Practice of Spiritual Herbalism: Transform, Heal, and Remember with the Power of Plants and Ancestral Medicine)
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We shouldn’t deny the spiritual lineage we come from. Dismissing our religious heritage is as ignorant as dismissing our ancestral heritage. It’s in the DNA, not just the physical DNA but the energetic, mental, and spiritual DNA.
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Donna Goddard (Geboor: Spiritual Fiction (Nanima Series Book 2))
“
The Christian today is separated from the biblical audience by a “river” of differences (e.g., language, culture, circumstances). This river hinders us from moving straight from meaning in their context to meaning in ours. We are certainly part of the same great story, but our place in the story is often different from that of our spiritual ancestors. Sometimes the river is wide, requiring a long bridge for crossing. At other times, it is a narrow creek, which we can cross easily. We need to know just how wide the river is before we start trying to construct a principalising bridge across it.[367]
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Terran Williams (How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy)
“
Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the “principle of parsimony,” Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily” or “Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.” The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the “primitives” who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious.
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Rick Strassman (Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics & Other Spiritual Technologies)
“
Ruins are an endangered species today because in a materialistic worldview they don't appear to have any relevance, yet from a spiritual point of view, they are irreplaceable containers of the spirit of family, ancestors, and time itself. Get rid of ruins, and we lose the guidance offered by memory. We wander around untethered to the past and carried, anxious and unconscious, toward a floating future.
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Thomas Moore
“
I’ve had motherland-born African family tell me I don’t have a right to my Africanness because my ancestors were sold. I have had multi-generation African American family tell me I don’t have a right to my Americanness although I was born and raised on Black soil in the U.S. of A. I have had Guyanese family tell me I don’t have a right to the culture that birthed my parents, grandparents, and their great-grandparents because I am a “Yankee.” For all these folks, I am an orphan. But that’s their problem, because only I get to define me, and I own all of my spiritual, cultural, geographical, and genetic DNA.
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Abiola Abrams (African Goddess Initiation: Sacred Rituals for Self-Love, Prosperity, and Joy)
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The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation.
It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.
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Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)
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Knowledge without vision is worthless; vision without knowledge is an ineffective concept that goes nowhere.”
“A vision is such a bridge that connects with physical reality and spiritual insight.”
“The climate of vision fertilizes and cultivates the state of mind.”
“Ineither understood nor realized how and where one can acquire wisdom in a school or a specific institution since such quality one holds from God-gifted and by birth nature, not from the lifelong time experience, which is knowledge, not wisdom. However, one can polish it with knowledge, which time indoctrinates.”
“The vision levitates wisdom and talent; it requires not to prove its authenticity with evidence since it speaks and implies itself, as the Sun evinces and shines its reality.”
“Your past is your ancestors and your life history. The wise ones do not ignore or forget that. It teaches and leads one to the vision for new ways.”
“If you are going to knock on the wrong door for your immature advantages that you do not see, I am not going to encourage that because I see the consequences of it with my experience and vision.”
“The wisdom displays the creation, and the vision analyses and evaluates that as its reality, accuracy, and precision.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
From my feeble understanding, this concept of Wakan Tanka is the creative force that binds and generates life. That exists beyond time and space. It is in no way anthropomorphic. Wakan Tanka is not a dude, being, entity, or demiurge. It is the mysterious power of the seven directions: north, south, east, west, up into the sky, down into the earth, and, finally, the seventh direction, the internal (inside the chest, the heart, the soul). Wakan Tanka is the God of our ancestors and binds us to them and is experienced in connection to the wind, the sunlight, the grasslands, and the water.
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Rainn Wilson (Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution)
“
For the new human, “wise” means something very different. It means being self-aware. Aspiring to your full potential. Noticing your character flaws. Identifying what makes you happy and what makes you miserable, then taking action to nudge yourself toward the happy end of the continuum. Living as a spiritual being on a physical path. Taking care of all your material needs just like your ancestors—then going beyond those to Bliss Brain. Bliss Brain is the brain of the future. It’s beckoning us to the next stage of evolution, and a wisdom that transcends the best of our ancestry. SELECTIVE ATTENTION Selective attention is the process of bringing desired experiences to the foreground of consciousness while delegating others to the background. When we train ourselves to direct our attention deliberately, we are able to shift our emotions in a positive direction even amid the distractions and annoyances of everyday life. The trick is to practice the subject-object shift we learned in Chapter 3. Even when you’re being buffeted by a strong emotion like the fear that served Caveman Brain so well, selective attention allows you to change. You can shift to the perspective of a witness, downregulate the intensity of feeling, and move yourself to a positive state. Selective attention doesn’t mean denying the problems you face. It isn’t avoidance; it’s making a choice from among a palette of options. While acting on fear was the best option for Caveman Brain, a conscious person examines all the options before selecting a thought, feeling, or behavior. By using the power of selective attention, we reshape our brains.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
“
In our veins runs the blood of the ancestors, the blood of the clan, the blood of the race. Your features are the features of your fathers and your soul is a continuation of the spiritual life of your ancestors.
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Gulbrand Lunde
“
When we say that body and mind are connected, this does not mean just your own individual body and mind. In you are all your blood ancestors and also your spiritual ancestors. You can touch the presence of your father and mother in each cell of your body. They are truly present in you, along with your grandparents and great-grandparents. Doing this, you know you are their continuation. You may have thought that your ancestors no longer existed, but even scientists say your ancestors are present in you, in the genetic heritage that is in every cell of your body. The same is true for your descendants. You will be present in every cell of their bodies. And you are present in the consciousness of everyone you have touched.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm)
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The dreams you have today, are the past hopes of your ancestors and the future promises of God.
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Siyanda Mfana
“
Indeed, the classic situation of the slave is that of the ‘socially dead person.’ But if religion, in the form of ancestor worship, ‘explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live,’ how, asks the sociologist Orlando Patterson, ought society to ‘relate to the living who are dead,’ that is to say, to the socially dead?
Patterson has insisted that the social death imposed by slavery entails a process involving the two contradictory principles of marginality and integration. Thus, the slave, like the ancestor, is a ‘liminal’ being, one who is in society but cannot ever be fully of society. ‘In his social death,’ Patterson asserts, ‘the slave . . . lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular.’ Patterson suggests, moreover, that in many slaveholding societies the social death of the slave functioned precisely to empower him to navigate, in his liminality, through betwixt-and-between places where full members of society could not. In some societies, the liminal status of the slave empowered him to undertake roles in the spiritual world, such as handling the bodies of the deceased, that were dangerous to full members of society. ‘Being socially dead, the captives were able to move between the living and the dead without suffering the supernatural harm inevitably experienced by the socially alive in such boundary crossing.’ Among precolonial African societies, Patterson has observed, ritual practices associated with enslavement also worked to ‘give symbolic expression to the slave’s social death and new status.
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Stephanie E. Smallwood (Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora)
“
The general opinion of the majority of the present-day nationalists in India is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We never dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our present helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all time to come by our ancestors, who had the superhuman vision of all eternity and supernatural power for making infinite provision for future ages. Therefore, for all our miseries and shortcomings, we hold responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside.
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Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism)
“
And notice that those cautions which the tempter whispers in our ears are all plausible. Indeed, I don’t think he often tries to deceive us (after early youth) with a direct lie. The plausibility is this. ‘It is really possible to be carried away by religious emotion – enthusiasm, as our ancestors called it – into resolutions and attitudes which we shall, not sinfully but rationally, not when we are more wordly, but when we are wiser, have cause to regret.
We can become scrupulous or fanatical, we can, in what seems zeal but is really presumption, embrace tasks never intended for us. That is the truth of the temptation. The lie consists in the suggestion that our best protection is a prudent regard for the safety of our pocket, our habitual indulgences, and our ambitions.
But that is quite false. Our real protection is to be sought, elsewhere: in common Christian usage, in moral theology in steady rational thinking, in the advice of good friends and good books, and (if need be) in a skilled spiritual director.
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C.S. Lewis
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Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives. And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver put it. But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.
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Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
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The proslavery theology that supplied the intellectual scaffolding for America’s first iteration of fascism never went away; it was the spiritual face of the second counterrevolution, and it is the direct ancestor of Christian nationalism today.
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Matthew Stewart (An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America)
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I was taught that each direction holds the energies of a sacred element and also correlates to a stage in the life cycle. In the Nahua tradition, we begin by facing the east, then turn to our left (as our heart is on our left) to face the west, then turn a three-quarter circle to face the north, then a half circle to face the south. Return to the center and raise arms or gaze up to the sky, and then kneel down to touch the earth. The following prayers may be said to honor each direction. We
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Lara Medina (Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices)
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Altars, or shrines, feed our spirit and psyche as they make visible our intent of bridging the physical and the spiritual realms and of sustaining the relationship between the two.
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Lara Medina (Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices)
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Afterward, Marvina and I fried the chicken, and, I tell you, all hell broke loose when Kerresha tasted the meat.
"Oh my God! Holy Jesus and Guadalupe Mary!"
Before Marvina could ask her to stop using the Lord's name in vain, Kerresha leaned back in her chair and feigned a heart attack. "Oh my God! Mmm, mmm mmmmm! Where? What kind of voodoo did you put in this chicken?"
"Ain't no voodoo here in this house," Marvina bucked.
"Yes! There is!" Kerresha licked her fingers. "I promise you. On God." She put a hand on her heart. "This chicken just took me back to the spiritual power of the ancestors."
Marvina was so flattered she couldn't be mad. We both looked at each other and laughed, because, truth be told, this was exactly the reaction people gave the first time they tasted Momma's seasoning on expertly fried chicken.
"Y'all." Kerresha raised both hands in the air like she was getting happy in a holiness church. "Is it the grease? The seasoning? Chickens raised by unicorns?"
"It's the seasoning," my sister and I said simultaneously.
Kerresha swallowed another bite. "Whatever y'all put in that seasoning is a miracle. A double miracle, since it also has the power to make y'all finally both agree on something.
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Michelle Stimpson (Sisters with a Side of Greens)
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Begin by calling in your council of spirit guides.
Grandfather, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now.
Grandmother, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now.
Ancestors, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now.
Creator, I'm calling on you; I need your guidance now.
2. State your prayer in simple terms.
I am facing [INSERT TROUBLING ISSUE], and I don't know what to do. I bring this issue to you for your guidance. Please bless this prayer with clarity, protection, and favor for the highest and best good for all.
3. Pray for Mother Earth.
And please bless our Mother Earth with healing and protection and ease the suffering of all her children.
4. Close with gratitude and remembrance.
I am grateful--Mitákuye Oyás'in
[(Me-talk-oo-yay Oy-yaw-sin) an indigenous lakota phrase that has a combined meaning of “we are all related” and “all is connected.”]
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Doug Good Feather (Think Indigenous: Native American Spirituality for a Modern World)
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The Ancestors met to talk about their dreams. I used to think that perhaps the wise among the Ancestors were like "dream interpreters"- but now my soul tells me otherwise; it tells me that to "interpret" dreams is to tame dreams. Bad enough that we should put animals in cages at zoos! Must we cage dreams? The dream wants to be talked about, shared, but explained? I think not. The dream shares its own wordless magic when it is told for the story it was- a story told by the oldest storytellers, the most mysterious storytellers- without the elaborations of the intellect that only seeks to make the dream "fit in" to another mold.
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Robin Artisson (Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism)
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†Type: The Exodus Ancestors Antitype: The Church The cloud The Holy Spirit The sea Baptism Baptized into Moses Baptized into Christ Spiritual food: manna Spiritual food: the Eucharist
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George T. Montague (First Corinthians (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture): A Catholic Bible Commentary on the New Testament by Trusted Catholic Biblical Scholars - CCSS)
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Spiritual drink: water Spiritual drink: the Eucharist or the Holy Spirit Rock: source of water Rock: Christ, source of the Holy Spirit Rock followed them in space Rock: Christ present with the Church, followed the ancestors in time
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George T. Montague (First Corinthians (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture): A Catholic Bible Commentary on the New Testament by Trusted Catholic Biblical Scholars - CCSS)
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Who is Aryama, the god of ancestors?
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Paras Parivaar Organization
“
We are seldom impressed by simplicity, unless it is the kind inflated with theatrics, which inevitably draws attention to itself—capsule wardrobes, minimalism, van life—and still is, in a manner, doing […] We become obsessed with the language of how God might ‘use’ us, never pausing to ask ourselves, What if God doesn't always want to use you? What if sometimes God just wants to be with you? We've become estranged from this idea. We would never articulate it as such, but undergirding much of our concept of calling is the belief that our primary relationship to God is anchored in transaction. God resists this. People think the sabbath is antiquated; I think it will save us from ourselves. When God tells the Israelites to practice rest, he uses the memory of their bondage to awaken them to what could be. ‘Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore, the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day’ (Deuteronomy 5:15).
When we rest, we do so in memory of rest denied. We receive what has been withheld from ourselves and our ancestors. And our present respite draws us into a remembrance of those who were not permitted it.
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Cole Arthur Riley (This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us)
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They passed the Confluence sometime that afternoon, where the Little Colorado River emerged from its own canyon on the left and bent around its delta to join the Colorado. The waves turned choppy and coffee-brown where the two rivers met. Tumbled stones, rounded by water, lay on the delta: azure and mauve, taupe and terracotta, some white and cracked like eggs ready to open, others like blunt black knives. The Confluence is a sacred place to the region’s tribes. Zuni send spiritual offerings down the Little Colorado to the Grand Canyon, the home of their ancestors. Hopis say nearby is the place of emergence, where all humankind climbed into this world, the Fourth World, through the hollow stem of a reed, and spread over the Earth, leaving footprints and broken pottery to mark their journeys. Hopi youth make a sacred pilgrimage to the Confluence to gather the salt that seeps out of the sandstone, pressed from an ancient sea and crystallized into gleaming stalagmites. They bring the salt back to the mesas east of the Grand Canyon, where, they say, their people settled at the center of the earth.
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Melissa L. Sevigny (Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon)
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We know very well that we have ancestors. But our ancestors are not only human. We have animal ancestors; we have plant ancestors; and we have mineral ancestors. Our human ancestors are still very young. Human beings appeared very late in the history of life on Earth. Our animal ancestors are still there within us. The reptile, the fish, and the ape are still in our blood. Not only were they part of us in the past, but they continue to exist within us. Just look deeply into your cells. We see that we are the whole history of life.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society)
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When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity.
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Valerie Tarico (The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth)
“
We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of our income for the communal good. But we do this almost without realizing it, through the anonymous agency of the taxation system; and if we think about it at all, it is likely to be with resentment that our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies or to buy missiles. We seldom feel a connection to those less fortunate members of the polity for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin. Neither recipient nor donor feels the need to say ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’. Our donations are never framed – as they were in the Christian era – as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships, with practical benefits for the recipient and spiritual ones for the donor.
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Alain de Botton (Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion)
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Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly—to be human. But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time.
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Ernest Kurtz (The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning)
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I think I know why purgatory became so popular, why Dante’s middle volume is the one people most easily relate to. The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection from the present onto the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story, here and now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings that form the gateway to life. Of course, this means that for millions of our theological and spiritual ancestors death brought a pleasant surprise. They had been gearing themselves up for a long struggle ahead, only to find it was already over.
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N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
In other Celtic lands, destruction of the ancient bardic orders meant the loss of history and myth as well as of poetry. But not in Ireland -- at least, not entirely. There, the melding of the Christian and the pagan began early, during the great period of Celtic monasticism. Irish monks of that period provided most of our written records of Celtic mythology. In continental Europe, evidence of Celtic beliefs is found only in sculpture; in Britain, it is found only in a few verbal shards and the occasional inscribed statue; but in Ireland we find entire epics, whole chants and songs, lengthy narratives. In the curvilinear script for which they are justly famous, Irish monks wrote down the stories, poems, place-names, and other lore of their pagan ancestors before it disappeared in the mists of history.
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Patricia Monaghan (The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit)
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Current biological research corroborates Darwin: we bear the past in us. We do not, cannot, begin all over again in each generation because the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous systems. Each of us is part of a vast physical-mental-spiritual web of previous lives, existences, modes of thought, behavior, and perception – of actions and feelings reaching much further back than what we call "history. We are filaments of a universal mind, we dream each others' dreams and those of our ancestors. Time, thus, is not linear, but radial’’.
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Don Sebesky (The Contemporary Arranger, Definitive Edition)
“
Cast in the mold of humanity, they were distinctly not men. They were winged and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart from that stalk. Aside from their wings, in physical appearance they resembled man only as man in his highest form resembles the great apes. In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual development they were superior to man as man is superior to the gorilla. But when they reared their colossal city, man's primal ancestors had not yet risen from the slime of the primordial seas.
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Robert E. Howard (Conan of Cimmeria (Conan 2))
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Every footprint leaves its mark in the sands of life. Step by step, each one tells a story.Beat by beat, echo voices of the ancestors
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Kokomon Clottey (Beyond Fear: Twelve Spiritual Keys to Racial Healing)
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The Old Cornwall Society decided during the 1920s to revive the custom of lighting fires along the Cornish peninsula, beginning in the east and moving westward as dusk approached. It is a custom which continues today and, when watched from a distance, still has the power to evoke in anyone who observes this ritual a deep connection with the earth and the ancestors.
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Carole Carlton (Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year)
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The power of your ancestors and the magic of the cosmos is in your DNA
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Jan Porter (Soul Skin, spiritual fiction by; Jan Porter: a spirited shaman's journey)
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1. Declaration of Intent: Hand lifting to the sky The first step is the collective declaration of intent to reestablish Kintuadi between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. That collective intent was implemented and manifested by the physical act of hand lifting to the sky. Objective: To first acknowledge that we are lost due to a false start and to seek the alignment and the Kintuadi of 3 Components; Creator, Catalyst and Creation (CCC). 2. Commitment and Decision: Cross Jumping The second step is the collective commitment and decision to abandon sinful, flesh and material driven life, and jump to the side of the creator and Christ. That collective commitment and decision was implemented and manifested by the physical act of cross jumping. Objective: To stop and commit to a change of direction. 3. Fasting and Meditation: Spiritual Retreat The third step is the collective fasting and meditation to gradually reduce total dependency on flesh and material driven life. This is the step of seeking spiritual enlightment, guidance and purpose for life. It is achieved by a temporary but frequent isolation and spiritual retreats. During this step, the body and soul are cleansed and fed with spiritual food. Objective: To stop dependency on human guidance but seeks spiritual guidance and direction. 4. Devotion and Service to God: Temple Construction (1987) The fourth step is the collective devotion and service to God. Now that body and soul are cleansed and fed spiritually, man devotion and service to god is manifested by the construction of the temple as an offering to God. The real temple is the body of Christ, the supreme sacrifice. Objective: To regain God’s trust by gradually training the flesh and material wealth to serve God. 5. Prayers and Faith Consolidation: Spiritual Soiree (1990s) Now that body and soul have constructed the sanctuary, the place of reunion and spiritual communion with God. This fifth step is the step of collective prayers and faith consolidation at the sanctuary, the place of invocation and the real body of Christ, our Catalyst. Objective: To repair and reestablish communication between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. 6. Redemption: The Begging for forgiveness; December 24, 1992 In the name of all humanity, on December 24, 1992 followers of Simon Kimbangu lead by Papa Dialungana Kiangani (Kimbangu son) gathered inside the temple in Nkamba, all wearing sac clothes and begged for the forgiveness of Adamus and eve original sin. After asking for forgiveness that Adamus himself did not have the courage to ask, the Kimbanguists burned all sac clothes. In 1994, Adeneho Nana Oduro Numapau II, President of the Ghana National House of Chiefs, initiated ceremonies in Africa and the Americas to beg forgiveness of African Americans for his ancestors ‘involvement in the slave trade. Objective: To reestablish and maintain interconnectivity between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. 7. Return to Eden, the Realm of Kintuadi (Oneness) December 24th, 1992 marked the beginning of a new spiritual era for mankind in general but for Africans in particular. The chains of physical and spiritual slavery were broken on that date. The spiritual exodus from Egypt, the land of Slavery to Eden, the Promised Land also started that date. On May 10, 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first black President of South Africa, Africa most powerful country. On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the first African American president of the United States, the most powerful country on earth. Objective: To enjoy the Oneness between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. Chapter 27 Kimbangu’s Wife, 3 sons and 30 Grand Children As stated in chapter 11, few months after Kimbangu’s birth, his mother Luezi died, so Kimbangu did not know his biological mother and was raised by Kinzembo, his maternal aunt.
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Dom Pedro V (The Quantum Vision of Simon Kimbangu: Kintuadi in 3D)
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Most probably your belief system is screwed up. And so were your ancestors, before you. And now, maybe so are you. Overcome it, you!
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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You are unlimited in this regard when you observe what you believe, when you release those beliefs that limit you, and fully step into your power as the creator of your reality. You have control with your beliefs, your thoughts, and your emotions to manifest, to create your outer world around you, not through pain or struggle but through inner peace. Your outer world, too, will begin to shift and lift into alignment, into love and full connection with the spiritual realm when you make these inner shifts. Indeed, you are here on earth to transcend all limiting beliefs from your ancestors, your family, yourself, and your society, releasing all limitations, and embracing positivity, well-being, harmony, and love. When these are the emotions behind your core beliefs, that fill you, then manifesting what you desire in the physical—peace, love, abundance, and happiness—your process becomes effortless.
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Melanie Beckler (Channeling the Guides and Angels of Light)
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It is significant that in most languages there is a single word for the essential virtue regarding both of these two relationships, which are the only two relationships where we cannot pay all that is owed. The word is “piety” (pietas). It means honor to both ancestors and God, the authors of our life.
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Peter Kreeft (Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas)
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In this moment of clarity, Saul regretted that he had opened the gates of Tartarus to satisfy his hunger. There was an emptiness in his soul, a deep and abiding emptiness, like a pit in Sheol, that drove him. He had believed that greatness and glory might satiate the hunger. But now he realized he had bitten off more than he could eat. He felt nauseous. Nevertheless, he determined to institute a pogrom to root out all mediums, necromancers and sorcerers from Israel’s territories. The Torah already prescribed death as the penalty for such spiritual traitors, but in reality was rarely enforced. Common Israelites in more rural areas, in the absence of contact with king or priest, degenerated into doing exactly what Saul himself had previously done. They sought for validation wherever they could find it. And there was plenty of validation from the gods of Canaan, who only asked for a small amount of recognition in return—a small amount of worship. Thus, many Israelites owned teraphim, little statues of gods or ancestors to whom they could maintain household shrines. Even some of Saul’s family had them.
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Brian Godawa (David Ascendant (Chronicles of the Nephilim, #7))
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While we do not contest in any way the majority of Professor Waddell’s findings, we do not accept “Aryan” as a term distinguishing racial type. We prefer to employ the term to distinguish caste and creed. In short, the so-called “Aryans” were not a race at all, nor were they descended from an Asian ancestor. An Aryan was a member of any spiritually endowed sect or cult that had its origin in prediluvian civilizations. Sadly, a lot of vexatious problems have arisen in the study of race and language simply because the world’s academics have paid no mind to the existence of the great prehistoric civilizations mentioned in so many myths and legends. The term Aryan has been misapplied from the beginning. When one interpretation foundered, another one, just as preposterous, was invented. Despite the work of many erudite scholars, the problem of misinterpretation continues to the present day.
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Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
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APRIL 9 YOU ARE REDEEMED FROM THE CURSE THROUGH THE BLOOD OF JESUS YOU ARE THE seed of Abraham, and I have redeemed you from the curse through the blood of My Son, Jesus. I have given you blessing instead of cursing, and life instead of death. I will break and release you from all generational curses and iniquities that came as a result of the sins of your ancestors. I have broken all curses of witchcraft, sorcery, and divination against you through the power of My Son. I will break and rebuke all curses of sickness and infirmity in My Son’s name. You have been redeemed—you are set free. GALATIANS 3:13–14; DEUTERONOMY 11:26 Prayer Declaration I choose blessing instead of cursing, and life instead of death. The blood of Jesus Christ has redeemed me from the curse. No longer will I fear the curse of the enemy, for I have been set free by the power of Jesus Christ.
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John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
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FEBRUARY 12 UNGODLY COVENANTS MADE BY YOUR ANCESTORS ARE BROKEN IF YOU VIOLATE My covenant, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, My anger will burn against you, and you will quickly perish from the good land I have given you. But if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers forever and ever. I have laid a sure foundation, and if you rely on My precious cornerstone and make My justice your measuring line and righteousness your plumb line, then I will disannul all ungodly covenants your ancestors made with idols, demons, false religious, or ungodly organizations in the name of My Son, Jesus. I will take hold of your hand and will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for unbelievers. EXODUS 23:31–33; MATTHEW 5:33; ISAIAH 42:6 Prayer Declaration I break and disannul all ungodly covenants, oaths, and pledges I have made with my lips in the name of Jesus. I break and disannul all covenants with death and hell made by my ancestors in the name of Jesus. I command all demons that claim any legal right to my life through covenants to come out in the name of Jesus.
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John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
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Orion's Tips for Sane Witchcraft (Ponder and Apply to Living) Know your boundaries. Find time for stillness. Look within! Do not confuse spirituality with egotism. Don't abuse power or give it to those who would abuse you with it. Live your life as an expression of conscious creation and divine revelation. Seek counsel daily with your source, your center, and your ancestors. Don't get lazy, crazy, or otherwise in your own way. Remember grace! It brings wisdom and unlocks more vast knowledge. Be sincere in all that you do. Never compromise (especially your integrity) or be compromised. If you lose yourself, you have nothing. Choose what matters and feed it. (Starve the bane, feed the blessing.) Get the lesson and get on with life. Too often life is what happens when you are busy doing something else. Maintain an attitude of thanksgiving. For in doing so, you give gratitude to source and maintain inner fertile space to receive more. Thank the source and its good spirits at the beginning and ending of each day. If you wake up in the morning, your day has already started out good . . . build from that position. Don't wait for a reason to be happy when it is right in front of you. Claim the direction of your spirit! Fall in love with being you. The seed of divinity is within you; live your truth. Give no enduring interest to what is not spirit while seeking spiritual truth in everything. Do not stray away from your faith in yourself and the source (for in truth they are one). You are guided by the source. Do not be bandied about by the waves of life or you will crash onto the rocks of doubt. Daily, reaffirm your connection with spirit. Renew yourself on the new moment and release the fetters of yesterday to their rightful home . . . yesterday. Weave your web to attract that which you desire . . . then seize it. A witch need not hunt when he or she can attract. If you fall down . . . move what tripped you, get up, dust yourself off, and above all, don't give up walking. In chaotic times, seek the eye of the storm, poise yourself there, and find the wisdom in the stillness. Give thanks for all opportunities to grow.
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Orion Foxwood (The Flame in the Cauldron: A Book of Old-Style Witchery)
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Our earliest ancestors were created by mixing DNA from other advanced extraterrestrial (ET) races. These highly evolved beings who used their DNA to create our ancestors are our creators. The way they create life is not the same as the way our scientists clone animals and plants. Our scientists exploit and work against nature, while our creators work with nature. Our creators' way of combining DNA is more of a harmonious design similar to how the Universe first created life. It is done by an intelligent design that works in harmony with the laws of the Universe. Once they created life, it was nurtured and left alone so nature could take its course. However, our creators will always keep an eye on their creations and help them as much as possible without infringing upon their free will. The first human race was created for
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Pao Chang (Staradigm: A Blueprint for Spiritual Growth, Happiness, Success and Well-Being)
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Anyone - your daddy or mine, your ancestor or mine, your god or mine - who bays for blood of "infidels" is an a***ole. And non-divine.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate
web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing.
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Eugene H. Peterson (Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading)
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Our spiritual ancestors have also given birth to us, and they, tol, continue to give birth to us.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, Living Christ)
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I Don't Know (The Sonnet)
What does winning or losing mean,
I don't know.
What does kill or be killed mean,
I don't know.
What does 'my culture, your culture' mean,
I don't know.
What does 'my nation, your nation' mean,
I don't know.
What does 'my people, your people' mean,
I don't know.
What does my life and your life mean,
I don't know.
I only know, we are not some mindless mouthpiece
for our dead ancestors and their shortsightedness.
It is time we bury the divisionism that
they passed on to us tradition and heritage.
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Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament)
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It’s instinctive to want to be buried on the land you come from. It has energetic importance. Aboriginal people got their spiritual bearings by knowing their ancestors were in certain places. It is an energetic navigational system. We would do the same, if we are sufficiently connected to the land and our body. Anyone aware that from soil they come and to soil they will return remains deeply connected to their roots.
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Donna Goddard (Nanima: Spiritual Fiction (Dadirri Series, #1))
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Never forget your home as you sojourn in foreign lands my son. We’ve waited for your return to our beautiful land where winds still whistle your name and wooden gongs pronounce you a worthy son of your ancestors daily. That soulful journey to our mystical river to cleanse your naked feet is in the journal of your life written by your forebears. As it’s written, the full moon will guide you through the narrow path to your destination. You'll arrive at a special place where your ancestors will witness your transformation into a Shaman, a spiritual healer you’re destined to become.
On the appointed day, as your name travels throughout our land, choice palm wines will find worthy palates to celebrate your soulful return. As your ancestors had written in the book of promises about your return before the last moon of the year, African sun will massage your skin during the day and harmattan wind will fan you to sleep at night. Hurry back home my son.
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Fidelis O. Mkparu (Soulful Return)
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they leave behind the places where their dead are buried – their mothers and fathers. The dead are bound to that place, and have returned to the land there. Because of this, Natives who are forced out of their homelands no longer have connections to their ancestors, and thus, to the spirit world. Their medicines no longer work. Their prayers are no longer heard. “Eventually, the younger generations forget the names of sacred places. And as the names and history and wisdom are forgotten, the peoples’ spiritual power diminishes. The culture collapses. How they perceive this change affects their whole way of life.
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Felix Blackwell (Stolen Tongues (Stolen Tongues, #1))
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Over the years I have met and made friends who believe in different gods. Many of my friends are common Christians. Some are Catholic. And others are born-again Christians. I have a circle of friends who believe in Allah. And others believe in the Hindu gods. I also have a few friends who believe in Bhudda. I have friends who believe in the ancestors. And yes, I have friends who do not believe in any god. They are unwavering atheists. The goal is to accept others without being changeable from my beliefs.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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there is not one person in a thousand who does not hold to some kind of superstition, and those most given to ridiculing the belief in witchcraft of past ages, believe in omens, prognostics, dreams and revelations. They carry a rabbit’s foot or buckeye, keep a horse shoe over or under the door, see spectres stalking around a table of thirteen, or could not be induced to start a journey or begin any work on Friday, and since people of the present day cannot explain the phenomena in spiritual manifestations, mind reading, electric wonders, etc., their ancestors may be excused for believing in witchcraft, inasmuch as they accepted the Bible for the guidance of their faith and believed all it says on this subject, as they did that pertaining to the soul’s salvation, and sought to put away witchcraft, that Christianity might prevail.
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M.V. Ingram (An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch)
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West Papua is an ancient and original particle, an atom of light and hope. It is a story about survival, resistance, betrayal, destruction, genocide, and survival against the odds. It is the last frontier where humanity’s greatness and wickedness are tested, where tragedy, aspiration, and hope are revealed. Papua is an innocent sacrificial lamb, a peace broker among the planet’s monsters, but no one knows her story – hidden deep beneath the earth – supporting sacred treaties between savages and warlords. West Papua is the home of the last original magic, the magic of nature. West Papua is the home of our original ancestors, the archaic Autochthons, the spiritual ancestors of our dream-time spiritual warriors- the pioneers of nature – the first voyageur across dangerous seas and land – the first agriculturalist – the most authentic, the original – we are the past and we are the future. West Papua is the original dream that has yet to be realised – a dream in the process of restoration to its original glory.
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Yamin Kogoya
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This is the night when the gateway between our world and the
spirit world is thinnest.
Tonight is a night to call out those who came before.
Tonight, I honor my ancestors.
Spirits of my fathers and mothers, I call to you tonight and welcome
you to join me.
You watch over me always, protecting and guiding me, and tonight I
thank you.
Your blood runs in my veins.
Your spirit is in my heart.
Your memories are in my soul.
With the gift of memory, I remember all of you.
You are dead but never forgotten, and you live on within me and
those who are yet to come
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Renée Jaggér (Birth of a Goddess (Reincarnation of the Morrigan #1))
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Rise up, from anything,
even that which you did not know was weighing you down.
Rise up, walk with me and talk with me.
You shine so bright in my Soul. Bright, even in the night.
Feel the release, set your Soul free. Breathe, in and out, with me.
Together, we fly, soaring high. Looking back at all the weight left behind;
Our ancestors guide us, as we return to the light, we embrace.
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Ulonda Faye (Sutras of the Heart: Spiritual Poetry to Nourish the Soul)
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During the Burning Times, standing out and speaking up meant risking literal persecution: imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, and murder. The scars of this trauma run deep in our collective unconscious; they remind us that in the not-so-distant past, being marked as different ran the risk of physical harm and death. Even today, being too much or not enough for modern society can mean being ostracized, judged, and shamed. In this way, the witch wound is your psyche’s way of trying to keep you safe. Your consciousness holds this warning because your ancestors’ bodies carried it over the span of generations, passing it down to you.
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Celeste Larsen (Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power)
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As if the natural world alone was not sufficiently demoralizing, our ancestors seemed compelled to augment it with supernatural forces designed to intensify its gloom. If religion's primary purpose was comfort against the vagaries of life, we could have wished for much better than the gods and myths we inherited.
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Matt J. Rossano (Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved)
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Colonization has changed everything about the way we live our lives. Our nations were made up of strong families that supported each other by intense extended affiliations and supportive networks of clans. Our people put a priority on knowledge and indigenous intelligence; there were always thinking and constantly assessing the possibilities of growth and adaptation to new realities. They possessed spiritual power and were guided in the conduct of their lives by their indigenous customs and religious beliefs. They were unified in their communities and interactions. This sense of unity was especially important to them because they understood the disunity degraded not only their existence as collectives but also their spiritual power as persons. Reciprocity and mutual obligation were the foundations of human interactions and of relationships with other elements of creation. This created the kind of solidarity that allowed them to withstand the challenges of survival in hard physical environments and against evil forces—that allowed them to survive intact as those nations. Most clearly different from the way we live our lives, our ancestors lived in a culture and society of warriors; there was social pressure for men to walk the warrior’s path, and women's roles were defined in accordance with their power and responsibility to maintain the culture and care for the families and to enable the men to defend the nation.
… we cannot hold on to a concept of the warrior that is gendered in the way it once was and that is located in an obsolete view of men's and women's roles. The battles we are fighting are no longer primarily physical; thus, any idea of the indigenous warrior framed solely in masculine terms is outdated and must be rethought and recast from the solely masculine view of the old traditional ways to a new concept of the warrior that is freed from colonial gender constructions and articulated instead with reference to what really counts in our struggles: the qualities and the actions of a person, man or woman, in battle.
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Taiaike Alfred
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Prince Arjuna, though born into the warrior estate, was at heart a peace-loving man. When the two colossal armies lined up on opposite sides, he began to have serious doubts about his task. It was not so much personal fear of death that swayed his heart but, rather, acute moral qualms. Has anyone the right, he wondered, to use force in order to promote the larger good? His dilemma was greatly aggravated by the fact that among those whom he was supposed to fight—maim and possibly kill—were kinsmen and revered teachers. Arjuna’s duty as a warrior was clear enough; he had to fight. But the moment he contemplated the larger implications of this action, he was terrified to abide by his decision to reconquer his lost kingdom. Arjuna’s attitude is typical of human life itself. We are all the time engaged in decision-making or in decision-avoidance. The more consciously we live, the more we realize that life is really an incessant stream of potential decisions. Arjuna, as we know, did fight his war and also emerged victorious. But first he had to learn an important spiritual lesson. Lord Krishna, who acted as his charioteer, convinced the prince that his whole confusion was the result of a faulty perspective. The God-man demonstrated to the prince that the problem that caused him such anxiety was a problem conjured up by the ego. It had no existence apart from the ego. The divine teacher made Arjuna understand that we can never transcend our circumstances merely by closing our eyes, by avoiding action, by dropping out. Even avoidance is an action, which will have its inevitable repercussions since avoidance is rooted in the ego. What Lord Krishna recommended instead was a cognitive shift, a new view of the whole matter: away from the delimiting, anxious ego and toward the boundless Self. All action must be sacrifice, he explained. We must not hold on to any conventional ego-derived scheme. Only when we abandon the delusion that we, as ego-personalities, are the ultimate initiators of actions can we have knowledge of what is truly right and good. That is to say, when we discover the “witness,” the transcendental Self, we realize that life unfolds spontaneously and mysteriously, and that the ego is merely one of the countless forms arising within the flux of life. For the Hindu authorities, the general deterioration of spirituality and the decline of humanity’s psychological health in no way precludes the possibility of spiritual aspiration and success. It is nowhere denied that contemporary humanity, feeble as it may be in comparison to its ancestors, can swim against the stream. On the contrary, all spiritual teachings affirm that we must do our utmost to cultivate spiritual values in the midst of the great darkness surrounding us.
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Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
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Like her spiritual ancestor William IX of Aquitaine, the Comtesse de Die made no pretense that love existed without voluptuous intimacy.
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Marilyn Yalom (How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance)
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Powerful Magic Wallets~@Magic Rings@[+27603483377 Ancestral Witch Craft For Money Spells in Malaysia Germany Canada France Qatar Belarus Belgium uk ,australia ~POWERFUL-MAGIC RINGS FOR PASTORS ,PROPHETS +27603483377 FOR MONEY_FOR PROTECTION Money Attraction ~ Pastor powers Miracle rings ~ Business boosting ~ Success in Stuacdies and Fame ~ Lover protection Magic rings THE magic ring was brought by the spiritual powers of long time ago and this ring helps to give people like pastors, preachers powers so that they can be above all others and healing. The magic ring also gives money or richness to people who are hopeless and POWERFULadding special powers to people who have their business with little customers, things are not going well in business or at work. This ring will help you to have extra powers in that when you put it even your bosses will listen to you and adding on your salary. The SUPER POWER MAGIC RING contains all powers of spirits ,ancestors, Talisman Commanding Power and special work to everyone who is in need, some thing in his life to order for magic ring Get loved and attracted ULTIMATE MAGIC POWERS FOR Leadership, preachers(fellowships) sangoma’s it help to get more powers. MEN/WOMEN LOVE ATTRACTION SPAS ALL ASSIGNMENTS: Work interviews, school exams, soccer interviews every where just use that ring TO BECOME RICH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE AND BE FAMOUS IN WORLD OR YOUR COUNTRY NOW
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mamabashiirah
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Another night, under the moonlight, she speaks to me. The language appears to me- as a dream in a dream. Asked to carry forth with a vision, a great path is presented. The waters to get there are not easy. I navigate, I asked and I doubt. 'Oh, but I must doubt the doubt, just as our great Maharishi had said.' She says, 'you are in the water, flow- swim through it and soon, yes very soon, you shall be freedom horse and you will meet the great wise tree.'
I continue feeling strong, growing in courage, I navigate the waters. I turn around to see- Oh, my journey Soul and friend is there- A little behind; yet, navigating as I am. Can I do it? Images of things and people- once known, situations once scorned. I float past deeper into the vast. I reach the edge of a great cliff- great glowing waters appear- I jump. No thoughts are there. I fall into the depths of the waters. What if I don't resurface? Will I have air to breathe?
I appear above it all. To my right is the grandest of trees. So strong, yet so soft and tender- I rest.
Looking back to everything else- to the Soul waiting above at the water's edge I cry out, 'jump'. Silence.
The journey must continue. The path is clear. The doubts have faded. The Soul is healed. My guides and ancestors ride with me as I am now freedom horse. The call is answered. The tribe awaits. We dance upon the water.
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Ulonda Faye (Sutras of the Heart: Spiritual Poetry to Nourish the Soul)
“
Great Tamerlane carried the lives of his ancestors into the field with him, in which he used to read before he gave battle, that he might be stirred up not to stain the blood of his family by cowardice or any unworthy behaviour in fight.
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William Gurnall (The Christian in Complete Armour - The Ultimate Book on Spiritual Warfare)
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Through death, there's a talking voice
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Mitta Xinindlu
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Once in memory, always in history.
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Levi Ramos
“
Undoubtedly one of the reasons Tylor’s theory became as popular as it did was that it was compatible with a number of other theories. Even though various writers began with different starting points, they wound up erecting similar pyramids of religious stages, and his animism was broad enough to accommodate their original points of beginning without toppling over anything else. His starting point for religion was the idea of a world filled with personal spirits. For Herbert Spencer, it was the fear of ancestor ghosts (Latin: manes); for Muir, as we saw, it was the veneration of natural phenomena; for Sir J. G. Frazer (1854–1941),30 it was the practice of magic, requiring a spiritual reality that could be manipulated; for John H. King, it was mana, an impersonal spiritual force.31 Granting the integrity of their differences, they still were not so different that they could not be integrated—with some adjustments—into the general scheme advocated by Tylor: beginning with the most simplistic and moving up the ladder to the most advanced (monotheism).
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Winfried Corduan (In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism)