There is no Christian church with a more direct, intimate relationship with the life of Jesus of Nazareth than the one I was born into: the Antiochian Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. Its roots lie in the same ground that Jesus walked on, and are deeper than the written Gospels. The church, my cultural heritage, and […]
Tag: Christianity
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped,and the insight to know the one from the other.—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1937 Introduction In the quadrune mind model of spiritual consciousness, we state that the purpose of a Human life is to reduce suffering and increase healing, but what does that […]
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Silent Behaviors
The Differences among Automaticity, Solemn Rituals, Spiritual Rituals, and Awe Recent posts have described incidents of unusually silent behaviors of people: Sacred Spaciousness in a Physically Tiny Montreal Restaurant suggested that a Human mentality was dominant in the vignette presented, while Automaticity: Humans Behaving Like Machines described examples of speechlessness when a reptilian mind was dominant. In this post […]
Recently I was talking with some friends and as we are all of a certain age, the conversation came around to funeral service options. For various personal and religious reasons, several different preferences were expressed. Choices included cremation, a launch to sea on a small boat, donation to a medical school, and my offering, a […]
Introduction Aesthetic distance is the ability to consciously remember that the murder scene in a performance we are watching is not “real” even though we are emotionally caught up in the drama. That way, we don’t yell “Watch out!” when our favorite character is about to be shot in the back. Our emotions do not […]
The Reptilian Mind For the infant, disruption of its biological homeostatic balance needed to sustain life is “felt” at a physiological level as life-threatening, which it is. Similarly, for the infantile reptilian-minded “adult,” anything experienced as a threat to the status quo can also be “felt” as life-threatening, as much as asphyxiation would be for […]
(A Comparison of Two Religious Politicians, Josh Hawley and John Lewis, in Light of the Quadrune Mind Model) Josh Hawley and John Lewis each has lived his life in service to what he believed was right. But does that mean they have both lived spiritual lives? For the quadrune mind, it’s the level of consciousness, […]