Can you step in the same river twice? Wittgenstein vs. Heraclitus

'I am not a religious man,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said to a friend, 'but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.' These problems that he claims to see from a religious point of view tend to be technical matters of logic and language. Wittgenstein trained as an engineer before he turned to philosophy, and he draws on mundane metaphors of gears, levers and machinery. Where you find the word 'transcendent' in Wittgenstein's writings, you'll likely find ...
Tags: Psychology, Religion, Innovation, Philosophy, Mind, Debate, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heraclitus, Wittgenstein, Meister Eckhart, Ancient World, Parmenides, David EganThis

3 ways to express gratitude as our pandemic-era Thanksgiving approaches

Dear readers, I recently attended a virtual Village Happy Hour, a monthly event sponsored by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Village. It brought together Village members to share a virtual drink, social connections and lively conversations. Note, the Village is a nonprofit membership organization to enhance older adults’ opportunities to age in place and stay connected to their community. (Other Villages in our community are the South Bay Village and Westside Pacific Village.) In the spirit of T...
Tags: Sport, Things To Do, Soccer, Usc, Helen, David Peterson, Meister Eckhart, Top Stories LADN, Top Stories OCR, Top Stories PE, Top Stories IVDB, Top Stories RDF, Top Stories Sun, Helen Dennis, Top Stories Breeze, Top Stories LBPT

Thanksgiving Quotes

Share one of these Thanksgiving quotes! Thanksgiving day is a day filled with friends, family, and food. These Thanksgiving quotes will help you remember gratitude for the whole month of November! Inspirational sayings and quotes can provide just the extra boost to uplift and inspire us.  Don’t miss these beautiful quotes. Wake up with one of these good morning quotes. Thanksgiving Quotes After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations. Oscar Wilde What if,...
Tags: Quotes, Crafts, Willie Nelson, John F Kennedy, Charles Dickens, Oprah Winfrey, Nora Ephron, Jonathan Safran Foer, Maya Angelou, Don, Henry David Thoreau, William Arthur Ward, Neal, James E Faust, Ina Garten, Albert Barnes

A 2-Minute Morning Routine that Guarantees a Great Start to the Day

by Neil Pasrisha, author of You Are Awesome “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” ― Meister Eckhart Do you know that clichéd Catholic confession chamber scene from the movies? “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the mobster says, on bended knee, behind the metal lattice. “I put Two-Faced Tony in a vice at the deli and chopped him out of the family.” I didn’t grow up Catholic, yet it always seemed interesting to me that confession was a religious practice. I looked into this ...
Tags: Life, Happiness, Judaism, Lifehacks, Meister Eckhart, Neil Pasrisha, Two Faced Tony

25 Quotes to Foster Emotional Resilience

“I ask not for a lighter burden, but broader shoulders,” says a Jewish proverb. That is the essence of emotional resilience … broader shoulders. We can’t control what illness we are diagnosed with, what tragedies come our way, or how many disappointments we will run into in our day. However, we can control how we face adversity of all kind: the big whoppers that feel as though they are sealing our fate and that we will never ever breathe fresh air again, and the inconveniences and frustrations ...
Tags: Psychology, Inspiration, Self-help, Self-esteem, Resilience, Albert Camus, Mental Health And Wellness, Motivation And Inspiration, Inspiration & Hope, Herman Melville, Coping Skills, Marcel Proust, Beatrix Potter, Louisa May Alcott, Helen Keller, Albert Schweitzer

The Lost World of Christendom

Long before “Liberty, equality, fraternity” became the cry of revolution in 18th century France, a Catholic monarchy reigned over this “most Christian country.” For over a millennia, Catholic France was the beating heart of Christendom. Christendom — once something that meant more than a geographical description of Christianity’s presence around the world. It was a place where temporal rulers, like the monarchs of France, submitted first and foremost to the divine law of the King of Kings, Jesus...
Tags: Hollywood, Featured, France, Religion, Jerusalem, Rome, United States, Burgundy, Trinity, Catholic, Christ, Narnia, Turin, Troyes, Jesus Christ, Arthur

He Wants to Be Friends with Us

The whole outlook of mankind might be changed if we could all believe that we dwell under a friendly sky and that the God of heaven, though exalted in power and majesty, is eager to be friends with us. But sin has made us timid and self-conscious, as well it might. Years of rebellion against God have bred in us a fear that cannot be overcome in a day. The captured rebel does not enter willingly the presence of the king he has so long fought unsuccessfully to overthrow. But if he is truly peniten...
Tags: Meister Eckhart

The End of the World

Mark 13:1-8   Let us pray to God that we may be free of God Meister Eckhart   “It’s not the end of the world…” This little phrase has become so common as to have a place in the Phrase And Idiom Dictionary. I wonder how many people know that Jesus was the first one to say it. In this morning’s reading from Mark, Jesus talked about all the terrible things that would happen before the end of the world:  Lots of people will be deceived, there will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and ...
Tags: Texas, Religion, Jesus, Mount of Olives, Speaking to the Soul, Meister Eckhart, Linda McMillan, Mark Jesus, Buraydah Saudi Arabia

Attitude of Gratitude: 10 Reasons to Be Thankful

The story of the ten lepers. (Luke 17: 11-19) is a Biblical passage that elicits profound joy. At the same time, there is intense sadness when Jesus heals the ten men afflicted with the terrible, contagious, terminal, and ugly disease of leprosy—a disease that was highly prevalent in the Biblical times before Jesus and during the lifetime of Jesus on earth. Profound Joy Their overflowing joy flows from the fact that the love, mercy, and compassion of Jesus were made manifest by a mere word whe...
Tags: Featured, Supreme Court, Church, Religion, United States, Jesus, Catholic, God, Shakespeare, Macbeth, PAUL, Luke, Roe, Saint Paul, Isaiah, Communion of Saints

Favorite Thanksgiving Quotes – Be Thankful Girlfriend!

Regardless of religion or political party, male or female, young or old, white or dark meat preference … we all celebrate Thanksgiving! Friends and family gather across our great country to share a meal, laughter, sometimes tears and a whole lot of turkey! Thanksgiving is the pinnacle of gratitude. It’s the day we stop to focus on gratitude, to gather with friends and family, to attempt to count our endless blessings. Send the following images or tweets of these Favorite Thanksgiving Quotes to y...
Tags: Thanksgiving, Life, Gratitude, Gerald, Courtland Milloy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Girlfriend INSPIRATION, Meister Eckhart, Be Thankful, Thanksgiving Quotes

When Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD, Experiencing “the Most Serene, the Most Beautiful Death” (1963)

The “spiritual adepts” of Tibet’s modern period, writes Huston Smith in his comprehensive introduction to the Bardo Thodol, or “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, “were inner-world adventurers of the highest daring, the Tibetan equivalent of our astronauts—I think it is worth coining the term ‘psychonaut’ to describe them. They personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its tra...
Tags: Google, UK, Science, Tibet, College, Life, Religion, US, World, Literature, John F Kennedy, William Blake, Buddha, Laura, Cohen, Facebook Twitter

Knowing He Is With Us

To demand too much of ourselves is to admit tacitly that we have at least some degree of confidence in our native moral ability, and of course it is also to admit that our confidence in God is correspondingly weak. The man who knows himself deeply will not expect anything of himself and will not be disappointed when he fails to produce. Brother Lawrence expressed the highest moral wisdom when he testified that if he stumbled and fell he turned at once to God and said, "O Lord, this is what You m...
Tags: Lawrence, Abraham, Meister Eckhart

Ten Ways We Can Grow in Love with the Eucharist

At the Last Supper, surrounded by His Apostles, Jesus gave to the world the most sublime gift of His Real Presence by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist – His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Jesus took bread and pronounced the words: “Take and eat, this is my Body”; then He took a cup of wine and said: “Take and drink, this is my Blood. Do this in memory of me.” With these words Jesus instituted the greatest of all of the Sacraments, the Sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist. Our eternal...
Tags: Featured, Thanksgiving, Religion, Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI, Prayer, Mary, Gabriel, John Paul II, Loyola, Ignatius, Augustine, Faith & Spirituality, Eucharist, Meister Eckhart, John Jesus

10 Ways to Grow in Friendship with Jesus and Mary

The ultimate purpose of our life is to grow to know, love and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus who said that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus is the real purpose of our existence. He gives meaning to all that happens in our lives—our joys and sorrows, successes and failures our life and death. Our Lady is always close to Jesus. The saints emphasize that Our Lady is the short-cut to the heart of God. The following are ten short suggestions how we can grow daily in Friendship with J...
Tags: Featured, Religion, Jesus, Shakespeare, Christ, Walk, Mother Teresa, Mary, PAUL, Lawrence, Bernard, Calcutta, Jerome, Loyola, Pope Benedict, Jesus Himself

A Helena Tulve moment

Und von liehte vinster, for bassoon and string quartet (2012), takes its title from the Middle High German of Meister Eckhart: "On earth, this entrance [to divine nature] is nothing but pure detachment, and when the detachment reaches its climax, it becomes ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, and dark with enlightenment." [Author: Alex Ross]
Tags: Music, Alex Ross, Meister Eckhart, Helena Tulve

True Gratitude is Enough

Years ago I pasted up a comic that features a matronly character with a cat purring at her feet. Ironically, it was from the strip called “Mutts,” but it wasn’t the mismatch between title and illustration that caused me to cut it out. Instead, it was the accompanying quotation attributed to Meister Eckhart, a late-medieval Dominican mystic. The quotation is this: “If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.” That yellowed comic still hangs on a wall in our home, but...
Tags: Featured, Religion, Jesus, Samaritan, Eckhart, Patrick McDonnell, Faith & Spirituality, Meister Eckhart, Marian High School

Be Thankful for these Holy Gifts

St. Ignatius asserted that the essence of sin is ingratitude. A great theologian of the past, Meister Eckhart, commenting on prayer, asserted that if the only thing we did in prayer was to “thank God” that would be enough! Shakespeare poignantly noted in one of his plays:  “More painful than a serpent’s tooth is that of an ungrateful child.” In the healing of the ten lepers, only one of those healed came back to Jesus to render Him thanksgiving, and it was a foreigner—a Samaritan.  Jesus marvele...
Tags: Featured, Thanksgiving, Holidays, Religion, United States, Jesus, God, Shakespeare, Saints, Jesus Christ, Gratitude, Holiness, Mary, St Michael, Tobias, Savio

Gratitude for the Greatest Gifts of All

The great mystical writer Meister Eckhart stated: “If the only prayer that we ever said were that of thanksgiving then it would be enough.”   Jesus was dismayed and saddened at the reaction of nine of the ten lepers who did not return to Him to render Him thanks for having cured them instantaneously of their terrible, ugly, and incurable disease—that of leprosy. (Lk.17:11-19) Given that ingratitude is so prevalent in the modern society and so displeasing to God, “the giver or all good gifts,” we...
Tags: Featured, Religion, Jesus, William Shakespeare, Catholic, God, Bethlehem, Jesus Christ, Elizabeth, Ars, Loyola, Emmanuel, Christ Christ, John Vianney, Faith & Spirituality, Meister Eckhart

Fellow Workers with God

If this working, yet not working, doing God's work, yet not doing it, should seem to be confusing, remember there is a parallel for it in the well-known testimony of Paul in Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." From all this I think we may draw the following conclusion: We can no more do the work of God than we can live the life of God. In the believing and surrendered soul, Christ lives His life again and continues to live it, and in ...
Tags: Christ, PAUL, Meister Eckhart

Ten Ways to Grow in Friendship with Jesus and Mary

The ultimate purpose of our life is to grow to know, love and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus who said that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus is the real purpose of our existence. He gives meaning to all that happens in our lives—our joys and sorrows, successes and failures our life and death. Our Lady is always close to Jesus. The saints emphasize that Our Lady is the short-cut to the heart of God. The following are ten short suggestions how we can grow daily in Friendship with J...
Tags: Featured, Religion, Jesus, Shakespeare, Saints, Christ, Walk, Mother Teresa, Mary, PAUL, Lawrence, Bernard, Calcutta, Jerome, Loyola, Pope Benedict

On Being Men and Women of God

"Your calling," said Meister Eckhart to the clergy of his day, "cannot make you holy; but you can make it holy." No matter how humble that calling may be, a holy man can make it a holy calling. A call to the ministry is not a call to be holy, as if the fact of his being a minister would sanctify a man; rather, the ministry is a calling for a holy man who has been made holy some other way than by the work he does. The true order is: God makes a man holy by blood and fire and sharp discipline. The...
Tags: Matthew, Meister Eckhart

Agape Love

"Love," said Meister Eckhart, "is the will to, the intention." By that definition, it is possible to obey the divine command to love our neighbor. We may not in a thousand years be able to feel a surge of emotion toward certain "neighbors," but we can go before God and solemnly will to love them, and the love will come. By prayer and an application of the inworking power of God, we may set our faces to will the good of our neighbor and not his evil all the days of our lives, and that is love. Th...
Tags: God, Meister Eckhart

What to Do with Burdens

"If a burden is laid on my back and another immediately takes it off and carries it himself," said Meister Eckhart, "it can make no difference to me whether it is one or a hundred pounds." In the Scriptures, there would seem to be three kinds of burdens recognized. First, the burden of loving help which we are admonished to give to others: "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). Secondly, the burden of moral responsibility which no one ca...
Tags: Eckhart, Meister Eckhart

Free Audiobook – Spiritual Classics

Spiritual Classics, a collection of excerpts by spiritual leaders and various religious texts, is this month’s free audiobook from LearnOutLoud.com (DRM-Free). Book Description LearnOutLoud.com is pleased to present our production of Spiritual Classics. With this series we have carefully chosen excerpts from key religious thinkers, as well as extracts from sacred texts. Collecting the cornerstone concepts that have contributed to the world’s most prominent faiths, it is our hope that it provid...
Tags: Books, Kingdom, Classics, Christ, Thomas, St Teresa, William James, Kahlil Gibran, DRM-Free, Free Audiobooks, Al Ghazzali, Meister Eckhart, Religion & Spirituality, Emanuel Swedenborg

Silence: Moral Ambiguity and Faith

I suspect Shūsaku Endō's 1966 novel and Martin Scorsese's cinematic adaptation, Silence, will never be blockbusters in sales, even though they are both masterpieces of religious messaging. Both the book and the film penetrate to the heart of the alchemical mystery of faith, where it almost does not look like faith at all--and even like its opposite, especially for those of us born after the mystical balancing act of knowing and not knowing was largely lost during the Enlightenment. Only the olde...
Tags: Japan, News, Catholic, Christian, Scorsese, Huffington Post, Graham Greene, Martin Scorsese, Judas, Shūsaku Endō, Endo, Richard Rohr, Meister Eckhart, Christian Wiman

Our spiritual work is our life as it is

"I would be more spiritual if my circumstances were more perfect." That's the "first illusion" cited by Ward Bauman in "Letting God be God," an article in Presence about lessons learned from Meister Eckhart.  (And wow, is it a familiar illusion to me!) Bauman writes: Meister Eckhart is emphatic that our spiritual work begins where we are right now, because God is in our circumstances as they are.... Eckhart goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to spiritual work. The sense that ...
Tags: Parenting, Religion, Jacob, Eckhart, Bauman, Meister Eckhart, Spiritual Direction

A (Spiritual) Revolution on the Way?

American democracy is in grave trouble. Not only because fascism is becoming fashionable again as it was in Europe in the 1930s, but because the very cause of Hitler's rise and success was the decline of democracy in Germany. Hitler was first elected in an election with very low turnout. The American election just completed also had very low turnout. Only 56.8 % of eligible voters voted in 2016 (vs 57.5 in 2012; 62.3 in 2008; 60.4 in 2004). That is 90 million eligible voters who did not vo...
Tags: Europe, News, Supreme Court, Putin, Obama, Congress, Stanford, White House, Germany, America, Barack Obama, Earth, Cnn, Fbi, Fox, Citizens United

Tom Hayden, A Warrior For Justice: Rest In Peace

I considered Tom Hayden a friend and a colleague. We did not get together often, but we collaborated on a number of occasions, I teaching with him in a class he offered on deep ecology years ago at a community college in Santa Monica; he lecturing at my university. When I was stepping down as president of my University of Creation Spirituality, I invited him to take over as president. He took the invitation very seriously and came up to Oakland for us to interview him and he to interview us. ...
Tags: News, Mississippi, Iraq, Los Angeles, Georgia, Earth, Chicago, Pope Francis, Vatican, Brazil, Catholic Church, Catholic, Cia, Oakland, Detroit, Council

Favorite Thanksgiving Quotes – Be Thankful Girlfriend!

Regardless of religion or political party, male or female, young or old, white or dark meat preference … we all celebrate Thanksgiving! Friends and family gather across our great country to share a meal, laughter, sometimes tears and a whole lot of turkey! Thanksgiving is the pinnacle of gratitude. It’s the day we stop to focus on gratitude, to gather with friends and family, to attempt to count our endless blessings. Send the following images or tweets of these Favorite Thanksgiving Quotes to y...
Tags: Thanksgiving, Life, Gratitude, Gerald, Courtland Milloy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Girlfriend INSPIRATION, Meister Eckhart

The Gift of Divine Power

It is the teaching of Meister Eckhart that there is something far inside the mysterious depths of a human life which is unknown except as God and the individual know it. This he called the "ground" of the soul. This "ground" is, according to Eckhart, the stuff which once received the image of God at creation. The lesser powers of the soul are the instruments through which this mysterious primal stuff makes itself felt in the world. These powers are imagination, reason, the faculty of speech and ...
Tags: Christ, PAUL, Eckhart, Meister Eckhart